London’s Courtauld Institute of Art has opened up its internationally-renowned collection of photographs to the public. It worked with 14,000 volunteers over five years to digitise more than one million images from The Conway Library.
Among them are images that offer a striking glimpse of the Middle East in the mid-20th century.
The photographs, in crisp black and white, depict Yazidi celebrations in Lalish in Iraq’s Kurdistan, refugees from Palestine making bread in Beirut, the Bedouin of Jordan, as well as landmarks such as Aleppo’s Grand Mosque, Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri and a medieval Armenian castle in the Adana region of Turkey.
The high-resolution photographs, along with the rest of the works in the Conway Library collection, are now available to browse online via The Courtauld website.
The Conway Library houses more than one million images that span the inception of photography to the present day. They include photographs of world architecture, sculpture, paintings and decorative objects. It includes unpublished images that reveal the extent of the damage across Europe following the Second World War, as well as TE Lawrence’s photographs of Saudi Arabia.
The project also includes 160,000 prints by Britain’s leading architectural photographer of the 20th century Anthony Kersting, documenting his extensive expeditions across the Middle East.
Since 2017, almost 2,000 in-person volunteers aged 18 to 86 have worked closely with The Courtauld to catalogue and photograph every image in The Conway Library collection — the majority of which have never been seen before. Volunteers were recruited from a wide variety of organisations, schools and charities, including The Terrance Higgins Trust, The One Housing Foundation, BeyondAutism and My Action for Kids. A further 12,000 volunteers participated remotely online.
“When we began the ambitious project to make The Courtauld’s Conway photographic library available online to the public in 2017, we expected no more than a handful of volunteers,” Tom Bilson, head of digital media at The Courtauld and director of the digitisation project, said.
“It turned into the largest public inclusion project in The Courtauld’s history — working with a truly diverse community of volunteers to engage with some of the most vulnerable people in our society, many of whom have historically been excluded from these kinds of opportunities in the heritage sector. Projects such as this have the capacity to transform cultural organisations by aligning it closely with new audiences that perhaps could never have been reached.”
Updated: May 05, 2023, 7:58 AM
