The Fine Arts Library holds the photographic archives of former Harvard faculty members as well as the work of other architectural and ethnographic scholars.
Rebii Barkin
Born in Istanbul, physician and amateur photographer Rebii Barkin was attached to the Turkish embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the 1930s. The collection includes snapshots and travel views of Afghanistan.
Edgar J. Fisher
E.J. Fisher was professor and dean at Robert College in Istanbul. Fisher and his wife seem rarely to have been without their cameras, and the collection includes thousands of their snapshots. Fisher also acquired photos from other sources during his tenure in Istanbul from 1913 to 1933.
Clarence Kennedy
Art historian and photographer Clarence Kennedy taught art history at Smith College. His work chiefly includes photos of sculpture, many taken from several different angles and levels of light to highlight various details and textural qualities. The images in this collection show more than 950 different works of mostly Italian Renaissance and Classical Greek sculpture.
Ralph Lieberman
Ralph Lieberman is an art historian and photographer specializing in Italian Renaissance architecture and sculpture. He has taught history of architecture at various schools including Williams College, Harvard University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. His photographs have appeared in many publications.
Arthur Kingsley Porter
Medieval architectural historian Arthur Kingsley Porter was a professor in the Fine Arts Department at Harvard University from 1920 to 1925. The Porter photograph collection includes general and detail views chiefly of Byzantine and medieval architecture and sculpture.
Josephine Powell
Born in New York, photographer and ethnographic collector Josephine Powell received an MA in social work from Columbia University in 1945. After teaching herself how to use a camera, she moved to Rome and began work in 1953 as a freelance photographer specializing in art, architecture, and ethnography.
In 1974, Powell moved to Istanbul, where she became an expert on the villages, nomads, and textiles of Anatolia. Throughout her career as a photographer she traveled widely in Europe, the Middle East, India, and Northern Africa.
This collection includes photos documenting the architecture, art, culture, and ethnology of countries in the Middle East and North Africa; Central, South, and Southeast Asia; and Italy, Greece, and the Balkans.
Images of art and architecture show frescoes, mosaics, and sculpture, including numerous stone-carved reliefs, and textiles and other decorative arts. Many of the objects photographed were from museum collections in Kabul, Peshawar, Delhi, and elsewhere.
Architectural images include Islamic, Byzantine, Hindu, and Buddhist structures.
Ethnographic images, mostly from Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan, include portraits and scenes of daily life in cities, towns, and rural areas showing men, women and children of different ethnic groups and religions, including nomadic people, engaged in various activities, such as weaving, pottery, farming, fishing, music, dancing, festivals, and ceremonies.
Judith Hancock de Sandoval
Judith Hancock de Sandoval was a pioneer in the photography of colonial architecture in Mexico. This archive contains photos and accompanying research materials. Almost half of the archive documents historical Mexican art and architecture from the 16th to 20th centuries, with an emphasis on Spanish colonial and vernacular architecture and extensive coverage of the Federal District, Oaxaca, and central Mexico.
Karl S. Twitchell
Karl Twitchell was an American geologist who worked in Yemen and Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. His extensive photographic record includes Yemen and Arabia and continues up to the early 1950s.
Baroness Marie-Thérèse Ullens de Schooten
Baroness Ullens spent several months every year from 1951 to 1972 in Iran, pursuing her interest in the great nomadic and seminomadic peoples of the west and south, the Qashqa'i and the Bakhtiari, as well as the Kurds and Türkmen.
Her archive includes color slides, photos, negatives, films, and audiotapes, which document ancient sites, Islamic architecture, and the landscape and ethnography of Iran.
Langdon Warner
Art historian, explorer, archaeologist, and Asian art collector Langdon Warner graduated from Harvard in 1903. He was appointed professor in the Fine Arts Department and curator of Asian art at the Fogg Art Museum in 1923. His photos are mainly from his expeditions in China and Central Asia.
Accessing These Materials
These collections are represented in HOLLIS at the collection level (via the links above) and may be requested for consultation in the Fine Arts Library's Special Collections Study Room.
Selections from the collections have been digitized and can be viewed in HOLLIS or HOLLIS Images.