Alison Frantz

Mary Alison Frantz (September 27, 1903 – February 1, 1995) was an American archaeological photographer and a Byzantine scholar. She is best known for her work as the official photographer of the excavations of the Agora of Athens, and for her photographs of ancient Greek sculpture, including the Parthenon frieze and works from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia.

Frantz was born in Minnesota. Following her father's early death, she lived briefly in Scotland, where she first took an interest in photography. She studied classics at Smith College, graduating in 1924. She first visited Greece in 1925 and held a fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) in 1929–1930. She carried out her doctoral research under Charles Rufus Morey, receiving her PhD from Columbia University in 1937. Frantz began working at the ASCSA's Agora excavations in January 1934. From 1935, she took on an increasing share of the excavation's photography, and was made its official photographer in 1939. She also took the first photographs of the Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean site of Pylos, images used for the first transcription of the tablets and consequently for the decipherment of Linear B. As part of her work in the Agora excavations, she excavated and restored the Church of the Holy Apostles, the site's last surviving Byzantine structure.

During the Second World War, Frantz joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). She worked as an assistant to Carl Blegen, another archaeologist turned agent, and gathered intelligence on European exiles in the United States. She served on an Allied commission to observe the Greek elections of 1946, worked for the US Information Service, and was subsequently the cultural attaché of the US embassy in Athens. In this capacity, she established the Fulbright Program in Greece.

Frantz left the Agora excavations in 1964. Her later work largely consisted of collaborations with archaeologists such as Gisela Richter, Martin Robertson and Bernard Ashmole. In 1967, she excavated a Roman tomb on Sikinos, overturning its traditional identification as a temple. Her publications included some of the earliest archaeological research into Ottoman Greece, as well as photography of archaic sculptures, Byzantine architecture and artifacts from the Aegean Bronze Age. She was considered among the foremost photographers of ancient Greek antiquities, and her work has been cited as a major influence on the scholarship and popular reception of classical Greece.

Early life and education
Mary Alison Frantz was born on September 27, 1903, in Duluth, Minnesota, the youngest of five children. Her father, a newspaper publisher, died of pneumonia soon afterwards; her Scottish mother, Mary Kate Frantz, moved the family to Edinburgh. Frantz received her first camera there, as a gift from her brother. She later described the experience, at the age of five, of watching her brother develop photographs in a darkroom as an early catalyst of her interest in the subject. After two years, the family returned to the United States. Her mother settled the family in Princeton: Frantz later credited this decision to the proximity of Princeton University, though she said that this was intended "for [her] brothers, of course".

Frantz graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in classics from Smith College, a women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts, in 1924. Among her teachers at Smith was the art historian Clarence Kennedy, whose use of photography to record ancient and renaissance sculpture, aiming to minimize personal style in favor of documentary accuracy, influenced Frantz's later work. She subsequently spent the 1924–1925 academic year as a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. During this time, she made her first visit to Greece, on a short trip organized by the Academy's director, Gorham P. Stevens, and his Greek wife, Annette Notaras. Frantz did not enjoy the visit, which lasted just over a month between April and May 1925; she wrote her mother that "Rome [was] far superior to Athens, except for the Acropolis".

Between 1927 and 1929, Frantz worked at Princeton University for the historian Charles Rufus Morey, researching for his Index of Christian Art. She returned briefly to Greece in the fall of 1927, visiting Priscilla Capps at her home in Athens. Capps was a fellow Smith College graduate and the daughter of Edward Capps, the chair of the managing committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA). She and Frantz traveled to Meteora in northern Greece, which Frantz described in a letter as "the most amazing place [she had] ever seen". Frantz carried out her doctoral studies into Byzantine art with Morey, a prolific supervisor of Byzantine scholars and conduit for the movement of junior scholars between Princeton and the ASCSA. As Princeton did not accept women as students, Frantz's PhD was awarded, in 1937, by Columbia University. She sarcastically referred to the Byzantine period, then out of scholarly fashion, as "the grubby period".

In 1929, Frantz was appointed as one of the first fellows of the ASCSA. She spent the 1929–1930 academic year working as a librarian at the ASCSA, during which she took her first photographs of ancient Greek monuments. She lived in a room, secured for her by Priscilla Capps, at Miramare Palace hotel in Old Phaleron. She visited Thessaloniki in 1930, where she was given a tour of the Basilica of Saint Dimitrios, a Byzantine church dating to the seventh century CE, by Aristotelis Zachos, the architect who had restored the basilica after its destruction by fire in 1917.

Early career
Frantz started her career in the Athenian Agora excavations, conducted by the ASCSA, in January 1934. She initially assisted Lucy Talcott, the excavation's recording secretary, in the Record Department. For much of her work in the Agora excavations, Frantz was an unpaid volunteer. During the 1930s, she worked largely on Byzantine painting, and made a study of the frescoes of several churches – demolished shortly afterwards – which was illustrated by the artist and draughtsman Piet de Jong. In 1935, she and Talcott visited the house of the Greek avant-garde artist Photis Kontoglou, where Frantz and Kontoglou discussed the techniques of fresco-painting.

The official photographer of the Agora Excavation was Herman Wagner, a member of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens. He was also employed in other excavation roles; from 1935, Frantz was increasingly made responsible for the photographic documentation of the project. She was given the title of official photographer when Wagner stepped down in 1939. Just before the Second World War, Frantz photographed in two days more than six hundred tablets inscribed in Linear B from the Mycenaean site of Pylos, brought to Athens by their excavator, Carl Blegen, for safekeeping in the Bank of Greece. A set of prints of the photographs were delivered in 1940 to the University of Cincinnati, where Blegen worked, and were used by Emmett L. Bennett to make the first transcription and edition of the tablets, which he published in 1951. Frantz's obituarist James R. McCredie credited her photographs with enabling the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris in 1952.

Second World War and aftermath
Following the Italian invasion of Greece in October 1940, archaeological work in the country was suspended. Several archaeologists of the ASCSA, led by Rodney Young and Benjamin Meritt, founded the American School Committee for Aid to Greece, which purchased ambulances to send to Greek forces. Frantz joined the committee alongside T. Leslie Shear, who had worked with her on the Agora excavations, Talcott, Edward Capps, George Elderkin, Hetty Goldman and Oscar Broneer. The committee organized a benefit concert to raise funds; Frantz and Talcott also collaborated on a book of photographs, This Is Greece. The royalties for the work, published in 1941, were used for the committee's work. By the end of January 1942, the committee had distributed $24,500 for aid to Greece.

Frantz moved to Washington, D.C., where she became a fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks research institute. In the summer of 1941, she and Young received a grant of $1,000 to compile an index of the first ten volumes of Hesperia, the school's academic journal. Young left the project and joined the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence agency of the United States, later that year. Frantz finished creating a set of alphabetic index cards, covering almost the whole English part of the index, before herself joining the OSS in the summer of 1942.

Frantz and Young were among several archaeologists, including the Americans Blegen, Meritt, and Shear and the British Alan Wace, to serve in Allied intelligence services in Greece. She was recommended to the OSS by Meritt, then head of the Greek section of the organization's Foreign Nationalities Branch (FNB), for whom she had worked part-time as an indexer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. At the OSS, she initially worked in the Research and Analysis (R&A) branch, before moving later in 1942 to work as an assistant and political analyst for Blegen, who succeeded Meritt in September of that year. The FNB was primarily tasked with interviewing people resident in the United States from European and Mediterranean ethnic groups, and would interview and record their views on the politics and situation of their native countries. Frantz's official title was Junior Social Science Analyst; her work primarily focused on interviewing political exiles from German-occupied Europe. She and Blegen were based in Washington, D.C., and she remained with Blegen as he moved to lead the FNB's Miscellaneous Languages section. Late in 1942, Blegen was appointed as head of the FNB's Chancery; Frantz once again moved with him, and was promoted to senior political analyst. In 1944, James Murphy, the head of the OSS's X-2 Counter Espionage Branch, unsuccessfully attempted to recruit Frantz for counterintelligence work.

Post-war government service
After the end of the war, the ASCSA was used as a conduit for US policy in Greece, particularly for the implementation of the Marshall Plan of economic aid. In 1946, alongside Blegen, Frantz was appointed to the Allied Mission for Observing the Greek Elections (AMFOGE), an organization of observers and statisticians sent by Britain, France and the United States to ensure the fairness of that year's elections, held on March 31, to the Hellenic Parliament. Frantz arrived in Athens on January 8, where she and Blegen, based at the latter's home at 9 Ploutarchou Street, created a training course in Greek history, politics and culture for the other American members of the AMFOGE. The two delivered the course in Naples in the following February, during which time they were trained in first aid, map-reading and physical conditioning, as well as in how to drive and repair a Jeep.

Frantz returned to the Agora excavations when they resumed in the spring of 1946. She briefly worked, in the same year, for the US Information Service, the public affairs agency for the United States abroad. Between 1946 and 1949, she served as cultural attaché of the US embassy in Athens, following Blegen in the role. In this capacity, she established the Fulbright Program in Greece, which sent ten scholars and eight senior research fellows to the ASCSA in 1949, and played an important role in restoring the Athens Symphony Orchestra. Throughout the 1950s, she delivered lectures in Byzantine Greece – at the time, an area rarely taught at US universities or in the ASCSA's courses – for visiting students and scholars.

Later career
Between 1954 and 1957, Frantz and the archaeologist John Travlos supervised the restoration of the Church of the Holy Apostles, constructed around 1100 and the only surviving Byzantine building in the Agora. This included the complete excavation of the building by Frantz, as well as the removal of a nineteenth-century narthex. Around 1958, she and the art historian Rhys Carpenter climbed Mount Pentelicus, guided by Homer Thompson, the director of the Agora excavations, to photograph an unfinished marble colossal statue near the summit. In 1963–1964, she excavated the ruins of the sixteenth-century Church of St. Dionysios the Areopagite, on the northern slope of the Areopagus.

Frantz remained the official photographer of the Agora excavations until 1964. She left the project to return to live in Princeton, and focused her work on collaborating on books with other archaeologists. This included traveling to Olympia with the British archaeologist Bernard Ashmole and the Greek archaeologist Nicholas Yalouris, where she photographed the sculptures of the Temple of Zeus. Frantz considered her work on this expedition to be the best of her career.

In 1966, Frantz visited the Greek island of Sikinos for two days, during which she correctly questioned the identification of what was then known as the island's Temple of Apollo Pythius. She secured permission from the Greek Archaeological Service to excavate the structure: she, Travlos and Thompson, returned in the last week of May 1967 to do so. Their work revealed that the so-called temple was in fact a monumental Roman tomb, dating from the second to third centuries CE. An exhibition of Frantz's photography was held at Smith College in October–November 1967. The latter exhibition focused on her images of Minoan and Mycenaean artifacts from Crete: her work in this field included images of the Hagia Triada Sarcophagus.

The archaeological historian Kostis Kourelis has suggested that Frantz, after her return to the United States, tried to establish herself as a fine-art photographer rather than as producing archaeological documentation: he notes that her last excavation photographs were taken in 1968. In 1975, she collaborated with the British classicist Martin Robertson on his monograph about the Parthenon frieze. Smith College hosted a further exhibition of her work in 1984, which included photographs of her cats alongside more conventional archaeological material. Frantz suffered a stroke in 1994, which affected her speech and movement. On January 27, 1995, she was struck by a truck near her home in Princeton; she died on February 1 at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick.

Assessment and legacy
An obituary in The New York Times described Frantz as "one of the foremost archaeological photographers of Greek sites and antiquities". The quality of her photography of the Pylos Linear B tablets was praised by researchers including Ventris, John Chadwick and Sterling Dow, for whom the photographs were the only means of studying the tablets during the Second World War, as the originals were held in secure storage in Athens. In 2005, the archaeologist John K. Papadopoulos listed her among the foremost photographers of ancient Greek monuments. John Camp, who directed the Agora excavations, was quoted shortly before Frantz's death as saying "when one thinks of the great photos of the past fifty years, the name of a single individual comes to mind – Alison Frantz". Frantz frequently contributed photographs to the publications of Gisela Richter, an art historian whose works, in the words of the scholar Elizabeth Bartman, "defined the study of Greek art for Anglophone readers during much of the twentieth century".

Frantz worked on Late Antiquity at a time when the field suffered from general scholarly neglect: her biographers Amy Papalexandrou and Marie Mauzy have credited her with contributing to the reassessment of the period from one of "degeneracy" to a respectable field of research. Kourelis writes that she "single-handedly created a field of Byzantine studies" for her work on the Agora. In their history of women in the Agora excavations, Susan I. Rotroff and Robert D. Lamberton described Frantz as being ahead of her time in her advocacy of a diachronic approach to the project, as opposed to the singular focus on the classical period then dominant in Greek archaeology. Her 1942 article on Ottoman pottery in the Agora excavations was one of the first to focus on that period in Greek archaeology, and was the first to exclusively handle Ottoman material; it remained one of few to do so until the 1970s. The archaeologist Joanita Vroom has listed Frantz, alongside her ASCSA colleague Frederick Waagé, as one of "the first pioneers" of Ottoman archaeology in Greece.

Frantz was one of relatively few women working professionally in either photography or archaeology during her lifetime. She is most famous for her photographs of the Parthenon frieze and of the sculptures of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. The archive of Frantz's photographs and negatives is divided between the American School of Classical Studies and at Princeton University. In accordance with Frantz's instructions, the ASCSA received the works that she considered useful to classical archaeologists and art historians, while Princeton's Firestone Library received her personal photographs. Most of these were hitherto unpublished; writing in The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Patricia H. Marks called the Frantz archive "an archaeologist's dream".

In 1967, Smith College awarded Frantz a medal for the most outstanding graduate of its humanities program. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1973. The ASCSA awards a scholarship in Frantz's honor, available to students working on post-classical Greece. In 2023, the Frantz Room in Loring Hall, the ASCSA's hostel for visiting students, was named after her.