By Annika Schultz ’26

The Baly slides are a collection of images taken by the late Dr. Denis Baly in the 1950s through 1970s. The full collection contains over 20,000 35 mm slides focusing on Middle Eastern, North African, and Southern European architecture. In my two semesters with the Visual Resource Center, I have worked through the first drawer which encompasses collections A–J and just shy of 1,000 slides of photography and data. Working with the collection from the top-down has allowed me to develop a uniform cataloging format for our Google Spreadsheet. Dr. Denis Baly’s photographic record contains an incredible range of imagery that spans from wide shots of landscapes to close-ups of patterns on the walls of various structures. After switching my major from art history to studio, it was these patterns that caught my attention as I began to study composition in addition to provenance. Although these photos appear less cinematic than many of Baly’s more expansive shots of entire structures, it is still possible to determine their position in the modern day structures to understand the longevity of pattern and design in Islamic architecture.

In the first ten collections, I was able to examine photographs of over twenty different mosques throughout the Middle East and Southern Europe. Dr. Baly included many detailed images of patterns and designs on the walls of these mosques. The one that has caught my attention in the Spring 2023 semester was from Collection B. This collection alone surveys three mosques just from the city of Isfahan, Iran. The first 50 slides are dedicated to the Friday Mosque of Isfahan, and my slide of interest was numbered B.028, a close up shot of a dark blue floral mosaic composition (Fig. 1). By comparing wide photographs from the collection to Google Earth’s April 2022 record of the mosque, I was able to identify that the design was on the south iwan of the mosque. The design was on the lower wall inside of the structure in a group of at least 6 other similar designs. What amazed me about this is the longevity of these compositions: this slide in particular was processed in September 1967, and the pattern can still be referenced in photographs from just 18 months ago. The images below explain my process for photographs such as this one.

I begin by looking at the slide for the photograph I am indexing, in this case B.028 (Fig. 2). This slide has been scanned and color corrected by my coworker, and the photograph alone is available on Digital Kenyon. I log any information included on the slide in the project spreadsheet. For B.028, I was specifically interested in the compositions contained in the “teardrop” shape on the right side of the image. In the spreadsheet, I summarize this written information as an “Image Note.” For B.028, there were no words or old numbers on the slide. The image note for B.028 is as follows:

Photograph created 1967. Photograph processed September 1967. Formerly cataloged as B.02.028. Notes written on the slide or index: Friday Mosque.

For this collection, I have recorded longitudinal and latitudinal information for the slides which can be helpful when trying to identify the exact part of a structure that the photograph documents.

I looked at two other images from the collection, B.018 and B.019, and compared these to the south iwan of the Friday Mosque of Isfahan on Google Earth street view (Fig. 3).

I am excited and grateful to continue exploring close-up photography of such intricate and unique compositions as I continue working through the Baly Image Collection.

Annika Schultz ’26 is a double major in Studio Art and Psychology. LinkedIn