Alfred Seiland began Imperium Romanum in 2006, when a commission from The New York Times Magazine to photograph the filming of the HBO series “Rome” at Cinecittà turned into something considerably more durable. Over the years that followed, he treated the physical remains of Roman culture—buildings, landscapes, artefacts—as points of reference rather than relics, photographing them across the territory of the former empire and beyond. Opus Extractum II, published by Hartmann Books in 2016, is the second volume in the series of extracts drawn from that ongoing body of work. It gathers 58 color plates made at 58 locations in 22 countries.
Seiland’s approach is neither archaeological survey nor romantic ruin-gazing. His photographic language is imaginative and at times ironic: Roman structures and objects are set against the evidence of the early twenty-first century that surrounds them, so that antique fabric and contemporary life occupy the same frame. What results is not a lament for lost grandeur but an examination of how deeply Roman precedent is embedded in the visible culture of Europe and the Mediterranean. Each plate is accompanied by an extended caption that addresses both the historical and the modern, the visible and the invisible dimensions of the site.
Philip Parker, the British historian, provides the introductory essay, a wide-ranging account of the empire’s time and space that precedes the plates. Shorter texts by Michaela Hüttner, Michael Mackensen, Friederike Naumann-Steckner, Meghan Poplacean, and Thomas M. Weber-Karyotakis accompany the sequence. The book’s design is by stapelberg&fritz, and Hartmann Books issues it as a hardcover with foil-stamped type at 29 × 24 cm, 144 pages, with text in English and French.
For a collector, the volume’s interest lies in its place within a coherent, long-running project rather than in any claim to rarity. Where first volumes of such series often serve as manifestos, this one extends and complicates the argument, and it documents a sustained collaboration between photographer, historians, and designers. It deserves attention as a considered statement on the Roman inheritance and on the photographic treatment of historical landscape—one that resists easy nostalgia and rewards slow reading of image and caption together.
