Leveraging on Richard Capobianco’s current studies of the theological hints in the thought of the later Martin Heidegger, this paper retrieves Heidegger’s account of anwesen (presenc-ing) by employing conceptual resources in Thomas Aquinas and challenging Heidegger’s caricature of the latter, suggesting that Thomistic scholastic categories properly understood and retrieved may well capture the features of anwesen, and that anwesen is a participation of that primordial Divine Intentionality, whom Edith Stein calls the “Ur-Theologe”. This is followed by a discussion of anwesen arche-tecture, which considers how we can shape our environments (arche) or accompanying (arche) lifestyles or practices in relation to anwesen. Such arche-tectural considerations focus not on the engineering of buildings but on bildung, that is, on anwesen’s formative effects for ethical development. Here, photography, the camera and the photograph are mused for their arche-tectural affordances. This paper also draws heavily on John Deely’s (and John of St Thomas OP’s) semiotics and pays special attention to how in various ways photographs can sign anwesen by way of a virtual or participated semiosis, functioning as a kind of beneficial virtual fieldwork.