Between 1991 and 2015, Josef Koudelka completed an epic journey across twenty countries bordering the Mediterranean, stopping at over 200 Greek and Roman archaeological sites, relentlessly researching the beauty of the ancient world.

Before the Magnum photographer, nobody had attempted to make such a comprehensive photographic record of these artefacts with so much persistence and so little assistance. In this book, produced in close collaboration with the photographer, Koudelka’s aim was to use art to re-appropriate a world that is escaping us and that we could lose – a world where the mind alternates between reason and faith, law and liberty.

Text by: Alain Schnapp, Héloïse Conésa, Bernard Latarjet