A Guide to Online Visual Sources in Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic Studies

Let’s face it: every publication is better with images. Whether it’s a presentation, a blog post, a book, or just a paper, images engage an audience instantly. The internet is flush with images from Islamic art, architecture, and society, but reliable sources (with credit information) are more difficult to track down. So we’ve done it for you! Here are some of the best sites for finding credited visual resources for Islamic, Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Feel free to suggest more in the comments and we’ll update the list! Note this list is specifically focused on images and visual resources, but not necessarily manuscripts (for a guide to online manuscript collections, look at Evyn Kropf’s list here).

Before we get started, here is a useful article on the copyright laws regarding digital reproductions of artworks in the United States from the Huffington Post. Remember these quick rules: If the original artwork is: (1) 2-dimensional and (2) In the public domain (published before 1923) and (3) the digital image of the artwork is a “slavish reproduction,” or not transformed in any way, then: the digital image is also in the public domain and may be used freely. It is always good practice to note where you got an image in your publication, however, if only so future readers –including yourself– can find it again! Most of these websites have preferred citations/credit lines somewhere on them. If the artwork does not meet the criteria above, you should request permission from the artist or publisher before republishing the image yourself, unless you are using it purely for educational, not-for-profit purposes.

Note: Most museums have catalogues that are searchable, with metadata and high-resolution images available for download with different policies for use and reproduction: examples include but are not limited to the Getty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Shangri-La Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

• Akkasah Photographic Archive at NYU Abu Dhabi: this archive, drawn from around the Middle East and North Africa, currently consists of over 60,000 images, of which more than 9,000 are currently digitized. Only low-resolution digital images are available online for free; Akkasah will send high-resolution files upon request. This requires simply filling out a form online.

 

• American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR) Photo Archive: ACOR is in the process of digitizing its collection of over 100,000 images it holds in its collection. So far, 20,000 are online. The collections largely cover Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq, with images of both daily life and archaeology. Images can be downloaded immediately, albeit with a watermark; ACOR can provide access to non-watermarked images.

 

• American University of Cairo (AUC) Digital Collections: this largely includes slides, historical maps, postcards, and films spanning the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Naturally, there is an Egypt-focus (even quite an AUC focus), but images of other places in the Arab and Ottoman worlds can be found with a bit of digging; images of upper Egypt are also a critical component of the collection. Also notable is the Hassan Fathy Architectural Archives, which includes the papers and sketches of the iconic Egyptian architect, and University on the Square, which documents the Egyptian Arab Spring. Reproduction rights need to go through the American University of Cairo; one cannot download images directly from the site.

 

• Arab Image Foundation Archive: The online platform of The Arab Image Foundation, Beirut’s non-profit archive of Middle Eastern photography, makes 22,000 images from the collection (so far) accessible and searchable. By registering an account, you can download the images as PDF files for non-commercial use.

 

• Archnet: this entirely open-access portal, curated by the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, is aimed at scholars and architects engaged with the Islamic world. It contains some digitized publications but is best known for its library of digital images which includes plans, photographs (both historical and contemporary) and descriptions of architectural sites around the world.

• Artstor Digital Library: the primary resource for art images online, much of the collection is restricted to members of subscribing institutions. However, they have some excellent public collections as well, including (but not limited to!) those listed below. The best features of Artstor are an automatic citation tool as well as a tool to automatically create professional-looking slideshows straight from the site.
  • The American Institute of Indian Studies: over 69,000 photographs of Indian art and architecture, including Indo-Islamic works.
  • David Wade: Pattern in Islamic Art: approximately 1,500 images of patterns and design elements found throughout the art of the Islamic world.
  • Shangri-La, Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art: contains almost 800 images of the collections from this stunning museum in the former home of the philanthropist and Islamic art enthusiast Doris Duke.
  • Sheila Blair, Jonathan Bloom, Walter Denny: Islamic Art and Architecture Collection: coming in at over 19,000 images, this massive and diverse archive combines the photograph collections of these noted scholars and photographers of various aspects of Islamic art and architecture.

 

• Das Bild des Orients: Over 25,000 digitized slides, prints, and negatives, searchable in both German and English, though the interface can be a little difficult to navigate. The focus is on art and architecture. Only thumbnail-sized images are available for free.

• The Gertrude Bell Archive, housed at Newcastle University, includes a collection of online images taken by Bell  during her time in the Middle East. 

• Harvard Fine Arts Library Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection: This archive consists of over 60,000 35mm slides of Islamic and South Asian artworks photographed by the noted curator Stuart Cary Welch over the course of his long career. It is particularly strong in its high-quality detail views of manuscripts and artworks that are difficult to access today. It is in process of being digitized, with several thousand cataloged to this date. The images are all open-access and free to download and use.

 

• The Islamic Painted Page (IPP): the IPP is an online searchable database of images in Islamic manuscripts. Not necessarily an online repository in itself, it allows you to search across a wide selection of manuscripts to see which manuscripts hold images to pertaining to any key words you like. If the image from a given manuscript exists online, IPP has a link to the image itself (and we have an interview with the man behind the IPP here). 

• Ottoman Turkish Garment Database: we are not quite sure where this came from (email us if you know) but it is a gem. It includes images of Ottoman clothing as well as illustrations of clothing, with various degrees of description attached to each image.

• Manar al-Athar: Based at the University of Oxford, this site aims to provide high-resolution, open-access, searchable images of archaeological sites, with buildings and art, for teaching, research, and publication. It is the first website of its kind providing such material labelled jointly in both Arabic and English. Images are freely available for academic and educational publications simply by acknowledging the source.

• The Middle East in Early Prints & Photographs Collection, New York Public Library: Over 9,000 images and growing from the extensive early printed books and albums held by the NYPL. Includes work by such early photography pioneers as Du Camp, Salzmann, Robertson & Beato, and Frith, as well as studios catering to tourist travelers in the last third of the 19th century, such as Arnoux, A. Beato, Bonfils, Lekegian, Sébah, and Zangaki.

• Palestine Poster Project: featuring over 12,000 (!) Palestinian posters dating from 1900 to the present, this archive is the largest such collection in the world. It was started by Dan Walsh as part of his MA thesis, but has continued to grow and develop ever since. It was nominated for UNESCO’s Memory of the World prize in 2016-2017. The archive is easy to browse and search, and open to all.

 

 

• Pierre de Gigord collection of photographs of the Ottoman Empire (The Getty Research Institute): The original collection includes  the 1850-1958 period, but the digitized collection, which is open-access online, runs until World War I. The images are mostly urban and cover Istanbul, though there is material of Izmir, Smyrna, the Balkans, and the Arab World. The collection is the work of Pierre de Gigord, who, during the 1980s, collected the images from Turkey.

 

• Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress: The Library of Congress’ collection has around 75,000 images of the Middle East and the wider Islamic world in its various collections. These images are available for download in high-quality JPEGs or TIFFs.

 

• Saudi Aramco World Digital Image Archive: This archive consists of over 40,000 images from among the published and unpublished images collected by this popular magazine from 1964 until the present. Registration is required, but small images are free for educational use.

• Suna Kıraç Library Digital Collections: The library at Koç University’s new digital collections platform offers access to over 210,000 digitized items – letters, photographs, manuscripts, slides, maps, sounds, rare books, videos and more – with a sophisticated search engine and filter tools. The collections consist of the materials of the Koç University Libraries and Archives (AKMED, ANAMED, SKL, and VEKAM) and collaborative projects with different institutions and researchers.

 

• University of Chicago Middle East Photograph Archive: About 400 photographs of the Middle East, from such famous photographers as Abdullah Fréres, Félix Bonfils, and Sébah & Joaillier. Most of the photos depict Egyptian scenes, though Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Damascus are represented as well.

 

• Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran: This unique digital archive collects oral histories, documents as well as photographs and artworks, but is largely visual in scope. It gathers together various scattered archives from around the world to provide primary sources for researching women in Iran during the Qajar period (1786-1925), and is well-organized and the images may be downloaded for non-commercial use. 

Amanda Hannoosh Steinberg is the Visual Resources Librarian for Islamic Art & Architecture at the Harvard Fine Arts Library, responsible for acquiring, describing and maintaining the library’s extensive Aga Khan Collection of slides and digital images. She is also a scholar of medieval Arabic literature, and received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 for her dissertation entitled, “Wives, Witches, and Warriors: Women in Arabic Popular Epics.” You can follow her on Twitter @MENALibAHS, or visit her Humanities Commons page.