For ten months I worked inside the manuscript library of the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian on Patmos with a 4×5 camera. Some days the librarian locked the door and left me alone in the room for hours.

I do not read Greek. The only things I could read were the doodles left in the margins: a profile drawn across a page of arithmetic, a figure with two rabbits coming out of his mouth that the scholars the librarian consulted could not explain.

So I photographed the books as objects: gold, parchment, exposed sewing cords, worm holes, ink that has not faded in a thousand years. These books survived because they were used.

There is colour everywhere in the library, and it would have held the eye on the ornament instead of the damage. Of the forty-seven photographs in the book, three are in colour.

In the documentation room next door, an office computer from the late 1980s sits beside a disc labelled Datalife. No current system can read it.