MESA Special Session 3-1
Images and Archives: Digital Collections in the Time of Corona
Organizer: Katie J. Hickerson, University of Chicago
The global impact of covid-19 has forced all members of the Middle East Studies Association to reconfigure our lives in profound ways. With travel restrictions in place, and institutions transitioning to remote learning or operating at reduced capacity, connecting archival resources with researchers and educators is an acute challenge at this moment.
“Images and Archives: Digital Collections in the Time of Corona” is here to help. Through five presentations, it offers a window into the dynamic digital archives and virtual exhibitions coming out of some of the top Middle Eastern photographic collections across the world. From newly digitized albums in historic collections, to the expansion and transformation of projects designed for digital platforms, to the creation of new crowd-sourced databases, this panel offers an archival tour de force for the socially distanced scholar.
This panel features presentations from Frances Terpak, Curator and Head of Photographs at the Getty Research Institute; Joanne Bloom, Photographic Resources Librarian at the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University; Beeta Baghoolizadeh, founder, and Mira Schwerda, digital exhibitions curator, of the Ajam Digital Archive; and Shamoon Zamir, founder and director of Akkasah at New York University, Abu Dhabi.
“Images and Archives” will be useful for scholars with specialties across the region—from North Africa to Central Asia—and to educators looking for resources to use in distance-learning classrooms. Ranging from addressing the connections between colonialism and visual culture to new initiatives to make collections widely accessible and contextually framed in multiple languages, this panel will foster conversations about the past, present, and future of photographic visual culture of the Middle East. Read on for more information on the speakers and links to the collections and digital exhibitions shared in the “Images and Archives”.
Frances Terpak is Curator and Head of Photographs at the Getty Research Institute, where she has built their photographic collections and curated exhibitions, along with authoring publications based on these collections. In 2017, she mounted the online only exhibition, The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra, which will be relaunched in Arabic and with new content on December 1, 2020.
Collection homepage: https://primo.getty.edu/primo-explore/search?vid=GRI
"The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra"; site will be expanded and relaunch as “Return to Palmyra” on December 1:
https://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitions_events/exhibitions/palmyra/
Joanne Bloom is the Photographic Resources Librarian at the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, a position she has held for the past 15 years. In this role she manages the acquisition, preservation, cataloging, digitization and public access to over 2 million original photographs spanning all formats and processes and dating from 1850-present. Among the most widely used resources are the collections related to the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. Joanne is currently involved in a multi-institutional project to digitize, catalog and make openly available as a virtual collection K.A.C. Creswell’s photographs of Islamic monuments.
Collection homepage: https://library.harvard.edu/collections/middle-east-and-islamic-photographs
Creswell Collection in Archnet: https://archnet.org/collections/12
Josephine Powell images: https://bit.ly/2SSPSLn
Josephine Powell bibliographic record: https://bit.ly/3lIMfEc
Peggy Crawford bibliographic record: https://bit.ly/37cdW42
Peggy Crawford collection in Archnet: https://archnet.org/collections/882
Bonfils bibliographic record: https://bit.ly/3lPw7R9
Charles Schroeder bibliographic record: https://bit.ly/3dqdD6Y
Charles Schroeder images: https://bit.ly/2H1ORhl
Ullens bibliographic record: https://bit.ly/2IvBF5d
Ullens images: https://bit.ly/33UvkIL
Near East Relief bibliographic record: https://bit.ly/3iYPd5u
Near East Relief images: https://bit.ly/3dxEb6j
Peter Lu images: https://bit.ly/2InoL9a
Peter Lu bibliographic record: https://bit.ly/2SUifcg
Beeta Baghoolizadeh, founder, and Mira Schwerda, digital exhibitions curator, at the Ajam Media Collective. Beeta Baghoolizadeh is an Assistant Professor in History and Africana Studies at Bucknell University and is currently a Research Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center. She has been an editor of Ajam Media Collective since 2012 and started the Ajam Digital Archive in 2015 as a space to focus on local and family histories across the broader Persianate world. She is also an artist, and her visual project, “Diaspora Letters,” examines the boring and mundane in everyday Iranian life and the resident historian at the Collective for Black Iranians. Mira Schwerda studies the interconnected histories of photography and printing in the Persianate world and teaches at the University of Edinburgh. She previously worked at the Harvard Art Museums, where she curated the photography section of the exhibition “Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran.” She is the co-founder of the Virtual Islamic Art History Seminar Series, is involved in the digital Islamic art history pedagogy initiative “Khamseen” and contributes to the Ajam Archive as a digital exhibitions curator.
Collection homepage: https://archive.ajammc.com
Digital article by Christopher Stedman Parmenter, “How George Became Kevork: Race, Law, and the Many Transformations of the Michaelian Family”: https://ajammc.com/2019/11/17/george-kevork-race-law-michaelian-family/
Khamseen Islamic Art: www.khamseenislamicart.com
Shamoon Zamir is Professor of Literature and Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi, and the founder and director of Akkasah. He has previously taught at the University of London, York University and the University of Chicago. His research focuses primarily on American literature, intellectual history and photography. His publications include The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian (2014) and Helen Levitt: New York (forthcoming).
Collection homepage: https://akkasah.org
Finally, please follow the extraordinary work of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), which was established by photographers and artists in 1997 in Beirut with a mission to collect, preserve, and research photographic objects and practices from the Middle East, North Africa and Arab diaspora. With a collection of over 500,000 photographic objects, the AIF is now rebuilding following damage of the August 2020 explosion.
Foundation homepage: www.arabimagefoundation.org