The Pleasure of Ruins

When I was eight years old, my mother bought me a copy of the Thames and Hudson 1964 version of Rose Macaulay’s The Pleasure of Ruins with wonderful photographs by Roloff Beny. I poured over the images, especially the black and white ones. It was not until much later that I noticed the text being special as well.

Dame Rose Macaulay was famous as a novelist and academic but also for a series of books which celebrated the pleasures of the everyday: Personal Pleasures (1935) followed by The Minor Pleasures of Everyday Life (1936). It was natural for this avid travellor to follow these two with Pleasure of Ruins in 1953. This was by far her longest book and she took 4 years to write it, travelling to her favourite sites in the Mediterranean, Near
and Middle East. Even before her death in 1958 she had discussed creating a pictorial version of Pleasure of Ruins, with an edited version of her text combined with photographs by Roloff Beny whose book The Thrones of Earth and Heaven (1958) she had greatly admired. In collaboration with Macaulay’s executor Constance Babbington Smith, Beny produced this new version. He expanded the focus to a worldwide gazeteer of sites and spent a year circling the globe creating the images.

Roloff Beny was born in Medicine Hat and went to the University of Toronto and spent the last 30 years in a flat overlooking the Tiber in Rome. He was a gifted artist in other media and it is this artistic sensibility which infuses his photographs with poignancy and emotion. He knows how to perfectly capture the beauty of the ruined fragments of the past.

Both Macaulay and Beny were interested in the intersection of history and ruination which ancient sites displayed. Both evoke the sensation of visiting these sites today and seeing nature reclaiming the land. When reading and viewing their books, one feels that they are taking you by the hand and guiding you through places which
have not been seen by man for millennia.