Harrison D. Horblit Collection of Early Photography

Discover the history and science of early photography through a collection of photographs and other materials.

Browse All Items

6476 items

 

Collection Overview

Dating from the very beginning of photography, this collection documents the history and science of photography from the 1830s to roughly 1900.

A science enthusiast and avid collector, Harrison D. Horblit ‘33 collected photographs no matter the condition, ensuring their preservation for us to see and study early photography. Objects in the collection include photographic prints, photographically illustrated books, reference works, cameras, and periodicals.

The images in the collection show us the evolution of the photograph from something slightly imprecise and sometimes fleeting to something more efficient, detailed, and long lasting. Nearly all (if not all) photographic processes from the 19th century are represented in the collection, including: daguerreotypes, salted paper prints, paper negatives, albumen prints, ambrotypes, and more.

We invite you to explore the collection to:

Still life with ancient Babylonian artifacts on books

• Learn more about the origins of photography
• View some of the earliest photographic prints, including early prints by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), credited as one of the inventors of photography and inventor of the negative to positive photographic process
• Examine different types and processes of photographs documenting the evolution of photography
• See how the subject of photographs has (or has not) changed over time
• View one of the largest daguerreotype collections in the world
• And look at vintage photographs from the 19th century for fun

The wide range of the collection documents a variety of ways people used photography in the 19th century, most of which we can still see in the photographs we take today.

We are working to catalog and digitize the collection so please check back again soon to see more material.

Claude L. Pickens, Jr. Collection of Photographs

Muslims in China

A window into the lives of Muslim communities in Western China during the early 20th century, collected by an American missionary.

Browse All Items

1216 items

Over 1,000 photos of Muslims and Christian missionaries working among them in Western China in the 1920s and 1930s form the core of this collection. The Harvard-Yenching Library collection, which also includes books, broadsides, posters and other items, captures a record of buildings, inscriptions, and Muslim culture lost to wars and the Cultural Revolution.

The collection was the gift of The Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr., an American Episcopal priest who worked for many years as a missionary to Muslims in Western China. The collection also includes a series of notebooks in which Pickens compiled an unpublished biographical dictionary of Muslims in China.

View collection details, including the collection finding aid, which includes a complete description of items in the collection.

 

About Pickens

Claude L. Pickens, Jr. (1900–1985), and his wife, Elizabeth Zwemer Pickens, were Christian missionaries of the China Inland Mission (C.I.M.) and had a particular interest in China’s Muslims, now officially designated as “Hui” in China. Their interests were both evangelical and scholarly. From 1927 to 1937, Pickens worked in river ports along the Yangzi and for the Episcopal Diocese in Hankow, where he was assistant pastor to the Chinese pastor at St. Peter’s Church.

In 1933, accompanied by his father-in-law, Samuel M. Zwemer, a missionary to Muslims in the Middle East, and again in 1936, Pickens and other China missionaries made surveys of Muslims in northwest China, northeast Tibet, and Inner Mongolia. In 1933, Rev. Samuel Zwemer was invited by the Kuling Convention Committee in Kiangsi, China, to address the Convention. Zwemer, who was editor of the influential journal Moslem World, had previously visited China in 1917 and made a trek into China’s northwest in 1936, during which he supplemented his earlier photographic record.

From 1937 to 1938, during the Sino-Japanese War, Pickens was on leave in the U.S. and in Zamboanga, Philippines, where he worked with Muslims. In 1939, the family returned to central China. During WWII, they were held from 1941 to 1942 by the Japanese as prisoners of war. From 1942 to 1945, Rev. Pickens worked for the FDMS in New York City and attended Columbia University. In 1945, he received an M.A. from the Dept. of Chinese and Japanese with a thesis entitled Annotated Bibliography of Literature on Islam in China (Hankow: Society of the Friends of Moslem in China). His own copy of the Bibliography contains numerous citations added by him in hand over the years and is held in the Harvard-Yenching Library’s collection of his materials. Rev. Pickens described the genesis of his collection in a letter to the Library in 1984:

I began collecting such literature in 1926 when I met Mr. I. [Isaac] Mason in Shanghai. He left to retire in England the next year and gave me a number of the old books. I was able to accumulate a number of the later publications through the Muslim Book Store in Peking. When we had to leave China after Pearl Harbor, I brought some of these Islam books home, took them back to China in 1945, and brought them out again in 1950. If nothing else, they have traveled a good deal.

After WWII, the Pickens family returned to central China, where Claude was Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Hankow, until 1950, when the family returned to New York. From 1953 to 1965, he worked with the National Council of Churches’ Student Volunteer Movement and then with foreign students in New York City for the Foreign and Domestic Missionary Society-Episcopal Church Center. In 1962, he took a leave to minister to Aramco employees in Arabia. He retired to Annisquam, MA, in 1969 to study and write.