For over twenty years, Koudelka has traveled through the Mediterranean--visiting places such as Italy, Libya, Greece, and Syria--to photograph more than two hundred archaeological sites. Stark and mesmerizing large-format photographs take the viewer to Delphi, Pompeii, Petra, Carthage, and other ancient locations, including sites now greatly altered or destroyed due to recent conflict. Ruins is a monument of architectural and cultural history, as well as civilizations long past.

Published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this volume includes enlightening texts by a Greek studies expert, curator, and agricultural engineer that cast another look at antiquity and its ruins.