John Falconer
John Falconer is Lead Curator of Visual Arts at the British
Library. This includes the Library's photographic collections, which
are particularly strong on historical collections of India, his
specialism. However, he has also been working on the Stein and other
Central Asian photographic collections for over twenty years, having
catalogued those at the British Library and the Library and
Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has also
travelled and worked in the field, including on IDP Field Trips to
the Taklamakan: many of his own photographs are now in the Library's
collections and were on display at the IDP20
photographic exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society.
He has also curated photographic exhibitions in Afghanistan, Sri
Lanka, Myamar, China and elsewhere. His chosen item is a photograph
taken by Robert Byron.
John Falconer writes:
In the decade before his untimely death in the early days of the
Second World War, Robert Byron (1905–41) established an enduring
reputation as an art and architectural historian. His travels
through Iran and Afghanistan in search of the purest examples of
Islamic architecture in the early 1930s are described in his
best-known work, The Road to
Oxiana (1937). While frequently displaying the casual
racism and snobbery common to so many upper-middle class
Englishmen of his generation, the book remains a perceptive and
often hilarious account of a difficult and sometime dangerous
journey. Despite radically personal and often idiosyncratic
opinions on architecture — he notes approvingly of the
Gumbad-i-Alaviyan at Hamadan that it 'wipes the taste of the
Alhambra and the Taj Mahal out of one’s mouth … I came to
Persia to get rid of that taste' — he was a passionate
devotee of the arts of Central Asia.
His extensive
collection of photographs (British Library shelfmark: Neg 1240)
is among the most enduring and valuable of his legacies,
providing a unique record of the buildings encountered and
described on his travels, many of them now inaccessible, altered
or entirely destroyed. The image selected here is rare in
including a human presence: in contrast to his prose, Byron was
not significantly concerned in his photographs with evoking
atmosphere or creating artistic images. His purpose was to
provide an accurate visual record for his own writings and for
future historians of architectural form. In his wanderings
around the monuments of Herat, a city that has seen massive
damage to its historic fabric in recent decades, he writes of
feeling as one 'who has lighted on the lost books of Livy, or
an unknown Botticelli'. His photographs preserve, however
inadequately, something of this heritage.
Coincidentally,
the Byron collection forms a further link with another important
archive of photographs in the British Library. Byron nursed an
unrequited passion for the traveller and writer Desmond Parsons
until the latter’s death in 1937, and had lived with him in
Peking in 1934. Parsons’ own photographs recording his visit to
the Dunhuang Caves in 1935 (BL shelfmark: Photo 1275), were
recently presented to the British Library and are also available
for study on the IDP
website.
Link to original post on IDP blog.