Scholarly Rigour in Gelatin Silver: K. A. C. Creswell’s Photographs of Islamic Architecture

Abstract

This article critically considers the aesthetics, process, and distribution of K. A. C. Creswell’s photographic collections of Islamic architecture. Creswell (1879–1974), a British university professor in Cairo from 1931 until his death, is considered one of the founders of the field of Islamic architectural history. As a young scholar in the 1910s, he took thousands of photographs of Islamic architectural sites, mainly in Egypt, which he then duplicated and deposited into major institutions of art historical study: Harvard University, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Villa I Tatti, the Ashmolean Museum, and the American University in Cairo. While he strove to objectively document historical sites through photography, Creswell also inadvertently captured aspects of everyday life in the city of Cairo. These slips of modernity in his photographs highlight how he ‘personally re-created’ distinctive study images that are not solely documents of architecture. His choice of camera, lens, angle, shutter speed, lens filter, cropping, and printing generated an identifiable photographic style that marked these images within the field of art historical study. These five photographic collections, spread across three continents, thus exhibit how photography facilitated the incorporation of the field of Islamic art into the wider field of art history.