Pantheon (interior), Rome, Italy

While the spaces themselves are ornate and traditional, with Burdeny mirroring the vantage points of Renaissance perspective painting, the light is cool and empty, with intricate architectural detailing and saturated palettes frozen in a kind of wintry stillness.The effect is not unlike a look behind a curtain, one that provides space and time for us to consider the quotidian sides to these well-traversed places. For Burdeny, creating this aesthetics of ambivalence—one that neither glamorizes nor entirely humbles his subjects—is important to his intention to present each place as “hovering somewhere between past, present and future, inviting the viewer to question the historical value of these places, and how we as tourists experience them.” The “traces” Burdeny refers to are therefore less literal markers than they are inherited or learned beliefs about beauty—the remnants of a bigger, invisible architecture.