Conway Library's photography collection goes digital, sharing rare images of Middle East

Five years, 14,000 volunteers and one million images later, the Courtauld Institute of Art's famed collection is now online

• 

  One million images from The Conway Library, London, have been digitised. Pictured, a Yazidi woman at Lalish, Iraq's Kurdistan region, October 1946. All photos: The Anthony Kersing Archive / The Conway Library / The Courtauld Institute of Art

• 

  Many of the pictures have never been seen before and share rare insights into 20th-century Middle Eastern life. Pictured, Yilankale, a 13th-century Armenian castle in the Adana province of Turkey, October 1963

• 

  The Dabke dance in progress at the annual Yazidi festival at Lalish in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, October 1946

• 

  The Great Mosque of al-Nuri, Mosul, August 1944

• 

  The Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, undated

• 

  A Christian Arab refugee from Palestine making bread in Beirut, undated

• 

  The 3rd-century funerary temple, or 'House Tomb', Palmyra, Syria, May 1945

• 

  A Bedouin woman in Jordan, March 1946

• 

  A Yazidi woman at Lalish in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, October 1946

• 

  The 2nd-century Roman theatre in Bosra, Syria, April 1963

• 

  Children in Jordan, January 1946

• 

  The Great Mosque in Aleppo, Syria, showing the ablution fountains and minaret, October 1962. It hails from the 11th century and was destroyed in April 2013

• 

  Yazidis at their annual festival at Lalish in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, October 1946

• 

  Anthony Kersting leaving Ma’an on the Hedjaz railway, Jordan, March 1946

• 

  Children at a mosque in Amman, Jordan, March 1946

• 

  Chaldean girls in the village of Tel Kayf, north of Mosul, Iraq, 1944

• 

  A woman and her child, Jordan, January 1946

• 

  Villagers near Beirut, 1960

• 

  A Christian Arab refugee settlement in Beirut, 1960

• 

  Remains of a British military building, Beirut, 1960

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.

Of the 14,000 volunteers, 2,000 have worked on the project in-person since 2017. The volunteers, aged 18 to 86, collaborated with the institute to catalogue every image in collection, many of which are never before seen. They were recruited from variety of organisations, schools and charities, including The Terrance Higgins Trust and BeyondAutism.

“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.”