The Harold
Stump World Architecture Slide Collection, photographed between 1959
and 1970, consists of approximately 30,000 Kodachrome 35mm slides,
from 32 countries. Arranged
alphabetically by country, and
within country by site, the collection is housed in cabinets designed by Stump specifically for his collection. The Stump
World Architecture Slide Collection is significant for its diversity
of represented locales, excellent photographic quality, and pictorial
documentation. Stump favored traveling alone, visiting African, Near
Eastern, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European countries,
seeking out local villages and architectural sites not routinely
frequented by Western visitors.
Highlights/Images
of the collection demonstrate the richness and scope of the Harold
Stump World Architecture Slide Collection. The collection
is noteworthy for its focus on townscapes, street scenes, and the
vernacular. It is also
significant for its photographic documentation of war-ravaged and
otherwise inaccessible locations, photographic quality, completeness
of documentation, and breadth of coverage.
Film quality is generally remarkable, with no visible color
fading or other imperfections. Stump had an excellent eye for the
vernacular, situating buildings in a geographic context, and often
including local inhabitants in his images. His photographic
compositional eye is direct, simple, and clean, particularly
appropriate for documentary and instructional photography. Many of the
countries photographed by Stump have undergone substantial change
since his documentation. Rapid
"industrialization" has changed the face of many of these
non-Western countries in the past twenty-five years.
Roads, automobiles, and television antennae are more prevalent
today than when Stump was photographing.
Warfare and civil unrest has obliterated or significantly
changed the face of many cities and towns in these countries.
Access to the many villages Stump visited was, and often
continues to remain, difficult. The collection highlights a particular
and unique slice of time, representing a view of the exotic
"orient" by a Western historian steeped in modernist
architecture. Instructional
and research materials able to support non-Western pedagogy and
scholarship are difficult to locate.
These materials reach beyond the visual fields of art and
architecture. Geography,
environmental planning, area and gender studies, English and
comparative literature are a few of the academic disciplines that have
been steadily increasing their reliance on visual documentation for
both instruction and research. The Stump
World Architecture Slide Collection thus remains an extraordinary
primary resource on the environment and cultural landscape of
pre-industrialized developing countries in the mid-Twentieth Century.
However, its documentation of Europe, especially 20th
Century modern architecture in France and
the Netherlands as well as Stump's home
state of California should not be
overlooked.
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