Tag: Historic photographs

The Kamil and Rifat Chadirji Photographic Archive comes to the Aga Khan Documentation Center

By on December 11, 2017

The Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC@MIT) is pleased to announce that it is now the home of the Kamil and Rifat Chadirji Photographic Archive.

Kamil Chadirji (1897-1968), born to an influential Baghdad family, played a central role in the political life of lraq as founder and president of the National Democratic Party. His position allowed him unique opportunities to take photographs throughout Iraq. Chadirji’s son, Rifat Chadirji (b. 1926), perhaps better known as one of the most influential Iraqi architects of the 20th century[1], was also an accomplished photographer, author, teacher, and critic. Together, their vast collection spans more than five decades and contains approximately 100,000 negatives and images documenting the Middle East, primarily Iraq.

The collection illustrates daily life, cultural engagement, and social conditions in the Middle East from the 1920s to the 1970s. This important record also provides a unique look at the significant transformation of Baghdad’s built environment over time.

Once on loan to the Arab Image Foundation (Beirut, Lebanon), the entire collection has been given to the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT. In 2016, while on loan to the Arab Image Foundation and with a grant from the Graham Foundation, the photography of Rifat Chadirji, in particular, was highlighted in an exhibition entitled, Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation. Although the material now belongs to AKDC@MIT, the exhibition remains on tour and will open in Los Angeles in early January 2018 before returning to MIT.

As with all archives given to AKDC@MIT Libraries, the collection will be catalogued, digitized, and made available to scholars, students, and research via AKDC’s research portal, Archnet, or in person at the Center. For more information, please contact akdc@mit.edu.

[1] Through the generosity of Rifat and Balkis Chadirji, AKDC@MIT also houses the Rifat Chadirji Architecture Archive.

International Tangier: Exhibit in Rotch Library

By on November 10, 2016

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An exhibit at Rotch Library features never-before-exhibited photographs of the early 20th–century International Zone of Tangier, Morocco. For centuries European powers battled one another and Moroccan forces for control of the city of Tangier, due to its strategic location on the Straits of Gibraltar, the point where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean. In 1924 an agreement made the city a demilitarized “International Zone” administered by a group of officials from other countries, yet still nominally under Moroccan sovereignty. With the exception of a period of five-year occupation by the Spanish during World War II, some variation of this arrangement remained in place until the city was returned to Moroccan sovereignty in 1956.

An exhibition at Rotch Library, curated by Michael A. Toler, PhD, highlights this period with prints made from the glass negatives collection of the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM) in Morocco. The photographs date from roughly 1900 to 1930, a period during which the city of Tangier underwent a transformation that has been unrivaled until the growth of recent decades. Not only is Tangier now seeing a radical transformation due to new construction and infrastructure improvements, but there is also a growing emphasis on historic preservation of the built environment. The exhibition juxtaposes the older black and white images against more recent photographs appearing on the image labels.

The exhibition is hosted by the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC@MIT) and organized in collaboration with the Program in Middle Eastern Studies of Wellesley College. It highlights a collaboration between AKDC, Wellesley’s Middle Eastern Studies Program, and Wellesley’s Office of Career Education to assist TALIM in the preservation of TALIM’s glass negatives collection. In the summers between 2013 and 2016, interns from Wellesley College went to Tangier and scanned all 2,000 negatives in TALIM’s collection, creating high resolution surrogates so the originals could be placed in cold storage. A catalog of the collection has been made available on Archnet.

AKDC@MIT and Wellesley College’s Middle Eastern Studies Program will host a joint reception for “International Tangier” on November 17 at 7:30pm.

An online version of the exhibitions will appear on Archnet soon after the reception.