This collection is available for use by appointment in the Department of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. For further information, please email avery-drawings@library.columbia.edu.
This collection contains primarily landscape and cityscape views primarily taken by professional photographers at international sites during the last quarter of the 19th century.
Photographers represented include Félix Bonfils, Kinbē Kusakabe, LaRoche Photo, Achille Mauri, Scowen& Co., J. Pascal Sébah, Sebah & Joaillier, and Giorgio Sommer. Only those images from Hawaii appear to have been made by an amateur photographer.
Locations represented are Ceylon, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, and the United States (Alaska and Hawaii). All images are albumen prints, mounted on boards. All images from Japan are also hand-tinted.
This collection is organized alphabetically by country, therein by photographer and numerically by view where assigned, and otherwise alphabetically by image title. Image titles are transcribed directly from the print; bracketed information is supplied by the archivist.
This collection is available for use by appointment in the Department of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. For further information, please email avery-drawings@library.columbia.edu.
Columbia University is providing access to the materials in the Library's collections solely for noncommercial educational and research purposes. The unauthorized use, including, but not limited to, publication of the materials without the prior written permission of Columbia University is strictly prohibited. All inquiries regarding permission to publish should be submitted in writing to the Director, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. For additional guidance, see Columbia University Libraries' publication policy.
In addition to permission from Columbia University, permission of the copyright owner (if not Columbia University) and/or any holder of other rights (such as publicity and/or privacy rights) may also be required for reproduction, publication, distributions, and other uses. Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of any item and securing any necessary permissions rests with the persons desiring to publish the item. Columbia University makes no warranties as to the accuracy of the materials or their fitness for a particular purpose.
Nineteenth-Century International Photographs, Dept. of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.
Russell Sturgis Photograph Collection, 1853-1903. University Archives, Dept. of Special Collections, Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.
Source of acquisition--Unknown provenance and acquisition. Accession number--1000.082.
Columbia University Libraries, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library
Photographs Processed AvR 08/2007.
2007-10-15 File created.
2009-10-02 File revised.
2019-05-20 EAD was imported spring 2019 as part of the ArchivesSpace Phase II migration.
Although the collector of this group of photographs is unidentified, many American and European architects in the 19th-century typically gathered images of important classical and "exotic" sites as souvenirs of travels and for design inspiration. Dozens of the sites in this collection, especially those in Paris, Istanbul, Cairo, and Japan, were particularly popular, and many of these images were issued by the photographers and their publishers in specially marketed series. It is possible that some of these images may be related to the collection of international photography gathered by New York architect and historian Russell Sturgis, now held by Washington University in St. Louis.
The subject headings listed below are found in this collection. Links below allow searches for other collections at Columbia University, through CLIO, the catalog for Columbia University Libraries, and through ArchiveGRID, a catalog that allows users to search the holdings of multiple research libraries and archives.
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