Joel Sternfeld’s Rome After Rome returns to the Campagna Romana, the countryside south and east of Rome where ancient ruins, modern construction and accumulated debris occupy the same unsettled ground. The book revisits Sternfeld’s 1992 project Campagna Romana: The Countryside of Ancient Rome, bringing together photographs from that earlier work with numerous previously unpublished images. Its subject is therefore not simply the remains of antiquity, but the changing relationship between contemporary life and the historical imagination attached to the Roman landscape.

The Campagna carries an unusually dense cultural history. Once restored and cultivated under the Roman emperors, it later became desolate after the fall of the city, its tombs, broken dwellings and aqueducts standing for centuries in a landscape that painters repeatedly transformed into an Arcadia. Sternfeld works within that tradition while refusing its consolations. His photographs place the ruins of a powerful civilization beside new buildings and the waste of the present, asking how modern Romans inhabit a landscape burdened by splendour, collapse and recurring ideals of renewal.

What distinguishes the book is its restraint. Sternfeld avoids the easy opposition between beauty and damage, and does not force the landscape into an overtly ironic allegory. Instead, the images hold despoilation and endurance in the same frame, allowing questions of historical decline, modernity and utopian desire to remain open. The resulting tension gives the book a seriousness beyond archaeological description or picturesque travel photography.

Published by Steidl in 2019, this English-language hardcover extends a sustained photographic inquiry rather than presenting an isolated encounter with Rome. Its 112 pages give the earlier and newly published photographs a renewed sequence and context, making the volume especially significant for readers interested in Sternfeld’s engagement with landscape, cultural memory and the moral ambiguities of looking at ruins. At approximately 42.7 by 36.3 centimetres, it also has the scale to let the photographs’ spatial and historical complexities operate with unusual presence.