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Show 23',?/*- Th* ART JOURNAL Fall, 1964 THE ISLAMIC ARCHIVES AND THE HISTORY OF ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE - It is obvious that the history of art and the history of architecture were impossible as academic disciplines until photography had reached a practical working level; it is less recognized by many university administrators that art and architectural historians need laboratories as much as do scientists, that the prime laboratories for art are museums, and for architecture the monuments themselves. And these laboratories need to be supplemented by a special iconographic collection with which to bridge the recording-communication gap between the artifact or building and the books. While the scarcity of adequate photographs is still hindering the study of many architectural monuments of Europe and the U S A, the often total lack or continuing inaccessibility of suitable photographic documentation is a veritable cultural road-block to research in and teaching of the architecture of Islam. A different pattern of circumstances (which will not be here discussed), has resulted in an almost identical famine of photo-documents for the study and teaching of Islamic decorative arts. Yet photography has become an almost universal hobby. T w o billion and a quarter dollars were spent in the U S A in 1962 for photographic supplies and apparatus. Many thousands of well-educated, camera-carrying Americans now visit the Near/Middle East and North Africa or are stationed in those Lands of Islam. Would their costly pastime, plus proverbial American generosity, add up to a new resource for documentary photographs for the study of Islamic culture and civilization, including its alluring and exotic architecture? In the faith that American photographers, both travelers and scholars, would be glad to share duplicates from their color slides and photoprints from their negatives, the Islamic Archives was launched. The 82,000-plus documents- mainly photographic-added to the Islamic Archives since its origin, have abundantly justified that confidence. Once the objectives of the Islamic Archives have been explained, no American photographer has hesitated a moment to cooperate. From suggestions dropped here and there, many such amateurs- including a distinguished Ambassador -have been inspired to photograph Islamic architecture for a purpose. And there w e have it: an entirely new resource for scholarly documentation of the history of Islamic and cognate architectures and the several other Near Eastern academic disciplines in which the photograph is a prime or useful document. And if w e expand this 'share your slides' concept to other areas- such as South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Far East and so o n - w e can see what a welcome enrichment of our documentary resources for understanding the cultures and civilizations of other lands and peoples is to be had for the asking. At the recent C A A - S A H joint meetings in Philadelphia, on the balcony off the salle des pas perdues, members could see projected 564 outstanding color slides of Islamic architecture and its decoration-minarets, mosques, tombs and palaces-from Moorish Spain to Mughal India. These slides came from the Islamic Archives. Here were not a few unrelated views of a monument, but distance shots, medium shots, close-up details and more details-a valid visual saturation with which to lead a student up to a building, let him walk about in it, and bring its colorful, exotic wonders to his eyes as a vivid aesthetic and architectonic experience. The modern scholar's problem is not h o w to use excellent photographs and color slides, but h o w to lay hands on them. The thousands of needed slides and photographs of Islamic and other exotic architectures are not available commercially, nor is there likelihood that they will be, first, because of the cost, and second, because only a creative scholar is likely to know what a creative scholar needs. What is indicated is a central repository, established as an adjunct to some great university library, where photographic documents useful to scholarship and teaching can be assembled and inter-filed with other documents (bibliographies, field notes, excerpts from the literature, notes on problems) which supplement the information in the photograph. This working collection, conceived from the point of view of creative scholarship and teaching, will provide a duplicate of any document- photographic or otherwise-at cost for research and teaching to any scholar or educational institution anywhere in the world; and it will maintain open files which any scholar or serious student may consult directly or use as supplementary documentation to the recorded knowledge in the adjoining general reference library. These, in brief, are some of the ideas which led to founding the Islamic Archives. The concept was a generation ahead of the development of Near Eastern studies in our universities. But the studies have caught up. It is high time the Islamic Archives-maintained up to n o w as an experiment sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Committee for Islamic Culture-be established on an operating basis in some American university. To this end, the U.S. Office of Education has asked m e to conduct -under the aegis of Pratt Institute-an inquiry among scholars, institutions and amateur photographers. I shall be most grateful to hear of any photograph collection-modern or old-or of color slides, made in the Near/ Middle East or North Africa and on through India, which contains views which can usefully illustrate any aspect of the cultures and civilization of the Lands of Islam: the people, their ways of life, crafts, artifacts, art, folk and other architecture, ancient monuments, transport, trade religion, institutions, countryside, towns and cities. And I shall be glad to hear from any scholar concerned with any aspect of these cultures and civilization who would like to give evidence for this present inquiry. MYRON BEMENT SMITH (Dr. Smith is Director of the Islamic Archives, Chairman of the Committee for Islamic Culture, Honorary Consultant in Islamic Archaeology of the Library of Congress, and Research Associate for Near Eastern Culture of Pratt Institute. H e may be addressed at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn 5, N e w York, or at Box 21111, Washington 9, D.C.) |