A translucent Maya visitor among the ruins and trees of Cahal Pech

A photographic series

GHOSTS

Ghosts in their own citiesGundolf Pfotenhauer

The Return

Returning to a place that is still theirs.

GHOSTS was photographed in the ancient Maya cities of Cahal Pech and Caracol in Belize. The people in these pictures are Maya, visiting places built by their ancestors.

Today these cities are presented mainly as ruins and archaeological sites. The civilisation that made them is often spoken about as something that disappeared, even though Maya people and their culture are still here.

Translucent figures returning to a stone courtyard at Cahal Pech — GHOSTS–02 · CAHAL PECH

Presence and Absence

Present, but made invisible.

Colonisation did not only take land. It interrupted language, belief, history and the right of people to tell their own story. Much of this heritage was removed, renamed or explained by others.

I photographed the visitors as transparent figures. They seem to appear and disappear among the stones, like ghosts in their own cities. Yet they are not figures from the past. They are living people returning to a place that is part of their history.

Ghostlike Maya visitors moving through the ancient city of Cahal Pech — GHOSTS–03 · CAHAL PECH

A translucent figure facing the great temple at Caracol — GHOSTS–08 · CARACOL

Their Own Cities

Faint figures on the terraces of Cahal Pech — GHOSTS–04

Two translucent Maya visitors inside the stone rooms of Caracol — GHOSTS–10

A ghostlike figure framed by ancient trees at Caracol — GHOSTS–11

GHOSTS is about absence, but also about presence.

The photographs ask who is allowed to belong to history, and what it means to return to a place that was never truly left behind.

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