Christopher Howard is communications manager for the American Academy in Rome.
The American Academy in Rome (AAR) announced that photographer Carole Raddato has gifted the core of her vast collection—some 30,000 digital images—to the AAR Library to ensure its long-term preservation and continued access to scholars. The gift represents the most important collection of images of antiquity to come to the Academy since Ernest Nash’s Fototeca Unione was formed in 1956, and is the first to consist of photos taken wholly in the twenty-first century.
Though self-trained as a photographer and ancient history enthusiast, Raddato has established herself over the past ten years as a premier and energetic photographer of Roman antiquity in the Mediterranean Basin, Europe, and the Middle East. Born in France, Raddato currently resides in Frankfurt, Germany, and is employed in the UK music industry. She started her popular blog, Following Hadrian, in 2012 as a way to tell the stories behind her images, and has built up a very sizable and active social media following.
“The American Academy in Rome is so pleased to have the collection of Carole Raddato’s images that span antiquity,” says Academy President and CEO Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow). “This collection enhances the AAR’s Photographic Archive and marks it as a leading resource for research and scholarship.”
So far, Raddato has photographed well over nine hundred sites and museum exhibitions focusing on the classical period. These include significant but less-visited archaeological areas outside continental Europe, including Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey (including southern and eastern Anatolia), Israel, Jordan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and most recently Egypt and Iran. One of her most valuable contributions is photographing ephemeral exhibitions of classical subjects in lesser-known museums.
The quality of Raddato’s images of both sites and artifacts is often the best available. Strikingly, she has made all her photos free for use under the Creative Commons/Attribution-ShareAlike license. Inevitably, her photographs have found their way into dozens of recently published academic books (see below). Carole herself has also published a steady stream of articles for Ancient History Magazine, the online Ancient History Encyclopedia, and the journal Studies in Late Antiquity.
“The Raddato images complement and build upon our existing archaeological holdings at the Photographic Archive and expand the latter into the twenty-first century,” says Sebastian Hierl, AAR’s Drue Heinz Librarian. “The donation cements our archives as a dynamic, growing resource for the Academy and scholars throughout the world and demonstrates our fundamental commitment to the classics.”
For samples of the collection, see the Carole Raddato page in the library’s Digital Humanities Center.
Selection of Published Works with Carole Raddato’s Photographs
T. Corey Brennan, Sabina Augusta: An Imperial Journey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Including cover.
Benjamin H. Dunning, The Oxford Handbook of New Testament, Gender, and Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Andrea Carandini and Emanuele Papi, Adriano. Roma e Atene (Milan: UTET, 2019).
Basil Dufallo, ed., Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome’s Flaws (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Philippa Adrych, Robert Bracey, Dominic Dalglish, Stefanie Lenk, and Rachel Wood, Images of Mithra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Steven D. Cone and Robert F. Rea, A Global Church History: The Great Tradition through Cultures, Continents, and Centuries (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
Steven D. Cone, Theology from the Great Tradition (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
Olympia Panagiotidou with Roger Beck, The Roman Mithras Cult: A Cognitive Approach (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
Lucia Cecchet and Anna Busetto, eds., Citizens in the Graeco-Roman World: Aspects of Citizenship from the Archaic Period to AD 212 (Leiden: Brill 2017). Front cover.
Sally Stone, UnDoing Buildings: Adaptive Reuse and Cultural Memory (New York: Routledge, 2019).
Walter D. Ward, Near Eastern Cities from Alexander to the Successors of Muhammad (New York: Routledge, 2019).
Ashley Dawson, Extinction: A Radical History (New York: OR Books, 2016).
Stephen Webb, Clash of Symbols: A Ride through the Riches of Glyphs (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018).
Matthew Barr, Lucy Cresswell, and Alastair Thorley, OCR Classical Civilisation A Level (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
Ben Greenley, Dan Menashe, and James Renshaw, OCR Classical Civilisation GCSE (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).