In recent years, the internet has swelled with various historical images both from official libraries and museums as well as private collections. The upside of this is that there are more images at your fingertips today than in any library in history. The downside is that through various means, some images are out there in a much reduced quality from the original and can be haphazardly or misleadingly posted so as to obscure or even completely change their reported source and subject. I have compiled a list of some nice collections for those looking for a large selection of digital images related to the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire.
Houshamadyan is a website dedicated to preserving the memory of Ottoman Armenian village life. While most sites dedicated to Armenians are more limited in scope and highly politicized, this site does an excellent job of gathering images from a wide variety of sources, including private collections and obscure books in many languages. There are many images on the site that will be of interest not just for historians of the Ottoman Empire's Armenian community but for anyone interested in finding pictures of towns and villages in Anatolia. Best of all, Houshamadyan does a fairly good job of providing detailed information about its sources. The image quality on this site is not spectacular but for the most part satisfactory.
MIDEASTIMAGE comes recommended by scholars and students of the Middle East and its history. This is a great website that is also easy to navigate. There is a huge and encyclopedic collection of images pertaining to the history of the Middle East, and the collection on people is of particular interest. The downside is that many of the pictures are not of high quality and not super-friendly for downloaders. The captions and citations are often good but sometimes lacking.
New York Public Library: http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/
NYPL offers a selection of photos almost entirely from Egypt and Palestine. These photographs will more than satisfy those interested in old ruins and architecture from the ancient, classical, and Biblical world, but this collection offers little on the wider Ottoman Empire. One of the nice things is that the images in this collection are not limited to photographs but also contain various sketches and other types of images from books and publications.
This website contains a very excellent collection of late-Ottoman and early Mandate period photographs from Syria and Damascus in particular. While the photographs are not necessarily high-resolution and many are run of the mill journalistic photographs of political and military events, the site contains pictures of many of Syria's notable families and figures. Unfortunately the site is not well-organized and downloading is partially restricted by a syrianhistory.com mark in the center of each picture.
This online collection based in the Netherlands contains many high-resolution historical images, particularly from the Dutch East Indies Company. They also contain over 100 photographs by Antoine Sevruguin, who took many pictures in the Kurdish regions of Iran and Iraq as well as at the court of Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar.
Smaller Collections
aZonguldak: http://www.azonguldak.com/
This is a website dedicated to the historical memory of the Black Sea town of Zongulak, which is Turkey's oldest coal mining town. It contains an impressive selection of photographs from the mining industry as well as of the town and its workers.
yousefhamidaddin.info
This is a great collection of photographs relating to different aspects of Yemeni society and culture dating back to the Ottoman era. The quality of the browsing experience is somewhat compromised by the particularly invasive watermarks added by site editor Yousef Hamidaddin, the grandson of Imam Yahya Hamidaddin. Nonetheless it is an excellent and accessible collection.
If you are looking for high-resolution images of Ottoman clothes and styles, you will not find too many on this site. However, it does present an extremely thorough array of various types of images that illustrate the kinds of dress and norms that existed in the early modern Ottoman Empire. The sections on costume include formal and informal, military and civilian, and male and female garb, and there is also some comparison with Ottoman neighbors such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and different minorities.
Smaller Collections
aZonguldak: http://www.azonguldak.com/
This is a website dedicated to the historical memory of the Black Sea town of Zongulak, which is Turkey's oldest coal mining town. It contains an impressive selection of photographs from the mining industry as well as of the town and its workers.
yousefhamidaddin.info
This is a great collection of photographs relating to different aspects of Yemeni society and culture dating back to the Ottoman era. The quality of the browsing experience is somewhat compromised by the particularly invasive watermarks added by site editor Yousef Hamidaddin, the grandson of Imam Yahya Hamidaddin. Nonetheless it is an excellent and accessible collection.
Images of Ottoman and Turkish Dress: http://www.kismeta.com/diGrasse/TurkishMuscowCostume.htm
If you are looking for high-resolution images of Ottoman clothes and styles, you will not find too many on this site. However, it does present an extremely thorough array of various types of images that illustrate the kinds of dress and norms that existed in the early modern Ottoman Empire. The sections on costume include formal and informal, military and civilian, and male and female garb, and there is also some comparison with Ottoman neighbors such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and different minorities.
