Vaughan Grylls - Drawing a Lesson from History 1974

About the Work

This work consists of a number of large paired panels. Each panel was covered by a photo enlargement of a photocopy of a photograph. As a result, they looked rather like charcoal drawings. The paired panels showed photographs of myself, dressed in an hotel bed sheet doubling as a Roman toga, posing in front of, on one panel, Roman style government buildings in Washington DC, and on its pair, the same style buildings, but the real thing, crumbling in the deserts of North Africa. I adopted mirror image poses in each case. I stood in the toga outside the White House, the Washington Monument, the National Archives Building (where I was asked not to photograph without written permission from the Senate for the use of a tripod), the Supreme Court (where I was threatened with arrest), the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial and the United States Capitol.
There were no interruptions in North Africa, except from a man with a camel who insisted on being included in the photograph outside the huge Roman amphitheatre standing in the desert at El Djem. I was happy to oblige, and he was juxtaposed with people watching me outside the US Capitol.
The photographs were taken in 1973, at the same time as Watergate and the continuing war in Vietnam.