Debris #1

When you climb to the top of St. Peter's Dome it offers a unique perspective to understand, physically, what the Church intended. By the time you reach the outer lookout at the very peak, Rome has receded below you in every direction, and the scale of what Michelangelo designed — and what it meant, at the time of its completion, to build something this tall — settles into your body in a way that no photograph of the exterior ever quite prepares you for. It is monumental. It is intentional. It is a structure built to raise people to a vantage point they may never have experienced otherwise, and to remind them, at that height, of who made it possible.

I stood up there with my film cameras hanging from my neck, and turned away from the iconic view. What I saw and stared at instead, was the iron hooks embedded in the stone at the dome's peak — remnants of a functional past, once essential, now simply left. No plaque. No explanation. Forgotten by the institution that embedded them there, too high for most visitors to ever notice. Debris #1 shows one of these hooks, patinated metal embedded into the weathered stone surface that fills the frame around it, presented here in an ornate antique metal frame with its original convex glass — the kind of frame usually reserved for large scale portraits of the important, the commemorated, the kept.

What institutions preserve and what they abandon without ceremony are rarely the same thing. The hook has outlasted its purpose, even outlasted the memory of its purpose, and remains — not as monument, but as debris. The frame resets the perception and gives its grandeur back.

This piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.