Album of Iranian Photographic Portraits
76 Items (Photographic prints, b&w)
A family compiled album bound in gold embossed green leather and sold by Au Bon Marche, Paris. Seventy-six informal and studio individual portraits or groups by a variety of photographers from the 1860s to the 1940s or later. Subjects are likely family members, although formal portraits of royalty are also included. Formats …
Album of Persian Photographs
Black leather bound album of 119 albumen prints and one silver gelatin print. Prints are likely produced by the studio of photographer Antoin Sevruguin in the 1870s and 80s in his early career in Iran. Includes handwritten captions in Persian. Many of the prints have an unusually purplish tone.
Stephen Arpee Collection of Sevruguin Photographs
62 Albumen prints (b&w, 25 cm. x 20 cm. or smaller)
A large album of prints by photographer Antoin Sevruguin, likely dating from his early career in Iran in the 1870s and 1880s. The collection also includes a number of loose, unbacked prints, many duplicating the photographs in the album. Roughly half of the mounted prints have English handwritten captions.
Myron Bement Smith Collection
The Myron Bement Smith collection consists of two parts, the papers of Myron Bement Smith and his wife Katharine and the Islamic Archives. It contains substantial material about his field research in Italy in the 1920s and his years working on Islamic architecture in Iran in the 1930s. Letters describe the milieu in which he operated in Rochester NY and New York City in the 1920s and early 1930s; the Smiths' life in Iran from 1933 to 1937; and the extensive network of academic and social contacts that Myron and Katharine developed and maintained over his lifetime. The Islamic Archives was a project to which Smith devoted most of his professional life. It includes both original materials, such as his photographs and notes, and items acquired by him from other scholars or experts on Islamic art and architecture. Smith intended the Archives to serve as a resource for scholars interested in the architecture and art of the entire Islamic world although he also included some materials about non-Islamic architecture.
Ernst Herzfeld Papers
An outstanding scholar in the field of Iranian studies, Ernst Herzfeld (1879--1948) explored all phases of Near Eastern culture from the prehistoric period to Islamic times. This collection documents Herzfeld's excavations at Samarra, Persepolis, Pasargadae, and Aleppo and includes correspondence; field notebooks; drawings; sketchbooks; inventories of objects; "squeeze" copies of architectural details; and photographs.
