Sarah Witte: Making Them Visible Again
Sarah Witte: Making Them Visible Again
Cyanotype, archaeology, and a contemporary way of looking at women who lived thousands of years ago
Some photographs begin with a camera. Sarah Witte’s work begins much earlier: with an encounter with an ancient object, with questions about how we look at it, and with the uncertainty of what it might once have meant to the people who made it.
Sarah Witte is working with small female figures from different Neolithic cultures. She photographs them, creates negatives, experiments with scale, and makes cyanotypes by hand. But the photographic process is only one part of a larger inquiry. What interests her is what can happen to an object whose original meaning has been lost. In our conversations, the artist told me that she does not simply want to reproduce these figures. She wants people to see them, to pay attention to them, and to encounter them as something more than archaeological objects in museum collections. That is important because it reveals the real starting point of her project. She is not trying to produce archaeological documentation, but to establish a new relationship with objects that have survived for thousands of years while much of the context that once gave them meaning has disappeared.
A name changes the way we look
One of the central concerns in Sarah Witte’s project is the question of naming. She does not want to call her figures “Venus”. Her objection is not simply to a particular word, but to the larger mechanism through which a viewer is given an interpretation before having the chance to look at the object without preconceptions.
The term “Venus” has a long history in archaeology and art history, but it is far from neutral. Researchers have repeatedly pointed out that it carries assumptions about the function and meaning of prehistoric female figurines, while the so-called “Venus” interpretation has itself been challenged in a number of ways.[1] The artist is interested in precisely that moment when a name begins to dictate a story. Rather than accepting a single inherited label, she refers to other names associated with femininity, motherhood, care, and protection: The Milk Giver, Silver Wheel, She that Dwells, Changing Woman, Mother of God. These are not presented as the original historical names of particular archaeological objects. They are part of Sarah Witte’s attempt to construct another vocabulary, one that allows the figures to be seen without automatically placing them within a single established narrative.
Her interest in names actually predates the Neolithic project. Sarah Witte told me about a series of small abstract paintings she made around fifteen years ago. On the back of each work, instead of a conventional biographical statement, she placed a poem entitled Call Her by Her Name. In the present project, that concern returns in a much more concrete form. This time it is connected to female figures that have survived for thousands of years without their original voices and that have subsequently acquired names assigned by modern researchers and viewers. Sarah Witte cannot recover an original name that may never be known, but she can make us aware that the name we use today is only one possible way of looking at the object.
An object small enough to hold
The second important issue is scale. Sarah Witte points out that many of the figures that interest her are very small, and some can literally be held in the hand. One of the figures that particularly caught her attention is held in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a small Neolithic seated female figure from Syria, carved in talc. It measures only 3.99 × 2.95 cm and is currently not on display.[2]
With an object this small, our natural impulse is to bring it closer to the eyes or to pick it up. The artist sees another possibility. The fact that such a figure can be held means that it need not be understood simply as something to look at. It may also have been something that existed in intimate physical proximity to the human body. In our conversation, Sarah Witte mentioned a suggestion she had heard from a historian: that some small figurines may have been made to be held during childbirth, perhaps as objects of comfort or reassurance. I would not present this as an established archaeological fact. It is a hypothesis Witte encountered, and one that has influenced the way she thinks about these objects. For her project, however, the idea is significant because it changes the imagined relationship between the figure and the person who once possessed it. A small object does not have to be understood only as a representation or ritual artefact; it may also have been something someone held.
That thought leads Sarah Witte toward a very contemporary gesture. One of the figures seemed lonely to her. She noticed the position of its arms and interpreted it as a protective gesture. A contemporary viewer might read the same posture as expressing tension, unease, or a need for protection. The artist responded by giving the figure another woman — someone to hold on to, someone with whom she would no longer be alone. She is not trying to reconstruct a historical scene. Instead, she is creating a new relationship with the object.
A contemporary body looking at prehistory
This is one of the most interesting aspects of Sarah Witte’s approach because she makes no attempt to present herself as an archaeologist. Her way of looking is unmistakably contemporary. When she says that one of the figures reminds her of her own mother listening to her talk, she is not making an archaeological claim. She is describing an experience of recognition.
This creates an intriguing connection between past and present. A figure made thousands of years ago becomes recognizable through gestures that a contemporary viewer can still read, not because we know what the prehistoric gesture originally meant, but because we recognize certain forms of human body language. The relationship is necessarily one-sided. We cannot know whether an ancient figure actually carried the meaning Sarah Witte sees in it, but we can recognize that a contemporary viewer is capable of constructing such a meaning. This is where photography becomes an interpretive tool. When Sarah Witte places two female figures together, an isolated object begins to participate in a relationship. When she enlarges a small figure, she changes the physical relationship between the viewer and the object. When she brings several women together, she creates a group that does not exist in any individual archaeological artefact. Photography does not recover a lost meaning; it creates the conditions for a new one.
From wings to a totem
The development of Sarah Witte’s project is itself a fascinating record of her creative process. At first, she imagined making individual “portraits” of the women. Then came the idea of giving them wings. Later she considered creating a large collage on Japanese paper and turning it into a Japanese fighting kite. Eventually she began thinking about a totem-like structure: a tall, free-standing, four-sided object carrying images of the women together with a group of different names. This sequence matters not simply because it shows a series of alternative designs, but because each form addresses a different aspect of the project. A portrait gives an individual figure a distinct identity. Wings were intended to suggest an additional sense of power, although Sarah Witte ultimately felt that the motif had become too familiar in contemporary visual culture. The kite introduced movement and space, but that solution also proved insufficient.
The totem idea is different. It brings together memory, belonging, protection, and continuity. The artist refers to forms associated with totem poles of the Pacific Northwest as an association that helps her think about a group of women as a kind of community or lineage of protectors. She is not attempting to reconstruct a specific Indigenous tradition. Rather, she is searching for a form that can carry the ideas she wants the work to express. At this point, a single photograph is no longer enough. Sarah Witte is imagining a larger object made from many images, an object that can itself become a new work of art.
Cyanotype is not incidental
Her choice of cyanotype is equally important. Sarah Witte has experimented with other processes and with toning, but she keeps returning to classic cyanotype. Her reason is deeply personal: she loves Prussian blue. She has said that she never gets tired of looking at the colour and that this was one of the reasons she chose cyanotype for the figures.
That decision matters more than it might initially seem. Cyanotype has its own history. John Herschel developed the process in 1842, and Anna Atkins began using it soon afterwards in her Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. A process that would later become familiar through technical and practical applications was transformed by Atkins into a photographic language in which documentation, composition, and the physical character of the print could become closely intertwined.[3]
Sarah Witte uses the same process in a completely different context. She is not photographing plants or making a straightforward technical copy. She begins with an existing photographic representation of an archaeological object, turns that image into a negative, and then makes the print by hand. The distinction is important because several layers now stand between the original object and the final image. The object is photographed; the photograph becomes a negative; the negative is exposed to light; and the final image emerges through a chemical process. Each stage can alter our relationship with the original object. Cyanotype is therefore not simply a way of producing a particular shade of blue. It becomes another stage of interpretation.
The negative as a place for decisions
The same is true of Sarah Witte’s work with digital negatives. She has been experimenting with making negatives “by eye”, without relying entirely on software. She studies the relationship between light and dark and tries to anticipate how the tonal structure of the negative will translate into the final cyanotype.
The negative therefore ceases to be merely a technical intermediary and becomes part of the creative process. This was particularly evident in one of her recent experiments. Working with a large 16 × 20 inch negative, she had to move the process outdoors because her indoor system is designed for smaller formats. The paper took a long time to dry in extremely hot conditions. When she finally exposed it beneath glass, residual moisture produced steam, leaving pale areas on the finished print that resemble clouds.
Sarah Witte had not intended to create this effect, yet she accepted it because, in that particular image, it seemed appropriate to the sleeping figure. It is a small technical incident, but it reveals something important about her practice. The process does not always do exactly what the artist expects. The material has its own behaviour, and an accident can become useful when it begins to work with the intention of the image. At such moments, the technique ceases to be an invisible tool and leaves a trace in the work itself.
An ancient form that looks modern
Sarah Witte has remarked that some of these figures look remarkably modern to her. This observation has an interesting historical context, particularly in relation to Cycladic art. The Museum of Cycladic Art points to the significant influence of Cycladic sculpture on twentieth-century artists including Constantin Brâncuși, Amedeo Modigliani, Alberto Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore. Simplicity of form, reduction, abstraction, and a strong relationship between shape and material became important points of reference for modernist artists.[4] The connection with Henry Moore is particularly well documented. The Henry Moore Foundation has discussed his interest in ancient Greek art and the relationship between his sculpture and Cycladic forms.[5] Sarah Witte is therefore not simply discovering “modernity” in prehistoric sculpture by accident. She is looking at it through a perspective that has itself been shaped by twentieth-century art history. Modernism taught contemporary viewers to recognize aesthetic value in reduction, simplification, and abstraction.
There is consequently an interesting reversal at work here. The artist looks at an ancient figure and recognizes something modern in it, but the very possibility of that recognition was partly prepared by the modernist reception of prehistoric art. What appears to us as a direct encounter with the distant past is already shaped by a long history of looking.
The camera as sketchbook
One of Sarah Witte’s comments particularly captures the way she works. She told me that she reaches for the camera much as another artist might reach for a sketchbook. Photography allows her to test ideas, and this changes the role of the camera. It is not primarily a device for producing the final image. It becomes a tool for thinking.
A photograph is made, then a negative, then a cyanotype. Sarah Witte tests scale, contrast, the relationship between figures, colour, the behaviour of the material, and unexpected effects produced by the process. Some ideas disappear, while others begin to develop. Photography becomes a laboratory rather than a destination. This also makes it difficult to regard her work as simple reproduction. A reproduction attempts to preserve the appearance of the original as faithfully as possible. Sarah Witte deliberately changes its conditions of existence. She enlarges it, isolates it, or places it alongside other figures, moves it into another medium, and gives it a new context. The final image is therefore not simply a photograph of a figure, but the result of a series of decisions made in response to that figure.
What is Sarah Witte actually photographing?
On a literal level, the answer seems straightforward: ancient female figures. But that does not fully describe her work. Sarah Witte is also photographing the contemporary way in which these objects are seen. We do not know the original meaning of most such figures. We do not know what they were called by the people who made them. We do not know how they were used or how their gestures were understood. The objects have survived, but much of the world that once surrounded them has disappeared. What remains is what can still be seen, and what we see has already passed through museums, archaeology, art history, reproduction, and contemporary language.
The artist adds another layer. Her process therefore involves an archaeological object, its photographic representation, a negative, a cyanotype, a change of scale, and a new composition. Each stage moves us further away from the original object, but each also gives the artist an opportunity to say something that a neutral reproduction could not say. In this sense, her project resembles a kind of reverse archaeology. An archaeologist removes layers in an attempt to reach an earlier state; Sarah Witte does the opposite, adding new layers of contemporary looking. She does not recover the past. Instead, she creates a new situation in which the past can be encountered again.
When does photography stop being reproduction?
This is where Sarah Witte’s work becomes particularly relevant to my own research. The question is no longer simply why contemporary artists continue to use historical photographic processes. A more interesting question is what happens when the photographic process no longer ends with the production of an image, but begins to participate in its meaning.
In Sarah Witte’s work, the boundary between photography and other forms of image-making remains fluid. The original photograph is material. The negative becomes a site of interpretation. Cyanotype alters the colour, surface, and character of the image. Scale changes the viewer’s relationship with the figure. An accident can affect the final appearance. Bringing several figures together creates a narrative that was not present in any single archaeological object. The technique is therefore not something that happens around the work. It is part of the work itself. That is what I find most compelling about Sarah Witte’s project. Not simply that she uses cyanotype - many contemporary artists do but that the photographic process becomes part of the way she thinks about the objects themselves.
Cyanotype allows her not only to show a figure, but to move it, enlarge it, remove it from the familiar scale of a museum artefact, and place it in a new relationship with the viewer.
Making them visible again
The entire project might be summed up in one simple statement Sarah Witte made to me: she wants people to see these women. That sentence carries more weight than it might initially suggest.
A small object kept in a museum collection may be important to an archaeologist while remaining almost entirely absent from the awareness of most viewers. Enlargement changes that situation. Cyanotype gives the object a new material presence. Bringing the figures together creates a sense of community. Changing their names challenges the authority of a single inherited interpretation. Sarah Witte does not claim to know who these women were. That is precisely what makes her approach interesting. She does not try to fill the gap with certainty. Instead, she uses photography to create a new experience around that uncertainty. Her project is therefore not a reconstruction of the past. It is a contemporary encounter with what remains of it.
An object was made thousands of years ago. It was later excavated, described, catalogued, and placed in a museum collection. At some point it was photographed. Now Sarah Witte takes that photographic representation and subjects it once again to light, chemistry, paper, and the artist’s hand. The result is something that did not exist in the archaeological context: a new image that does not pretend to be the original. Perhaps this is why Sarah Witte’s project is such an interesting example of the contemporary use of a historical photographic process. Cyanotype cannot restore a figure’s lost meaning. It cannot tell us how the people who made it understood it. What it can do is make us pause and look again at an object that has survived for thousands of years, but which is still capable of entering a contemporary visual and emotional conversation.
Not “Venus”, but a figure whose meaning remains open. Not a catalogue number, but an object that can once again command attention.
Not simply an archaeological reproduction, but a contemporary work through which an ancient presence becomes visible in a new way.
Notes
A. Nowell, M. L. Chang, “Science, the Media, and Interpretations of Upper Paleolithic Figurines”, American Anthropologist, vol. 116, no. 3, 2014, pp. 562–577, DOI: 10.1111/aman.12121.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seated female, Syria, Neolithic period, late 8th millennium BCE, talc, 3.99 × 2.95 cm, accession no. 1985.356.32, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, Anna Atkins, 1843–1853, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record.
Museum of Cycladic Art, “From Cycladic Culture to Modern Art”, Museum of Cycladic Art, educational and analytical material on the reception of Cycladic art by twentieth-century artists.
Henry Moore Foundation, “Henry Moore and Greece”, exhibition material accompanying the exhibition at Gagosian, Athens, 12 September–26 October 2024.
UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, World Heritage List, description of the site and its anthropomorphic figures, including the so-called “Sleeping Lady”.
