Introduction
At the end of the nineteenth century, the British artist, photographer
and traveler Frederick W.W. Howell, F.R.G.S., recorded Icelandic and Faroese
landscapes, farmsteads, towns and people in a remarkable series of photographs
that depicted Iceland and the Faeroe Islands on the edge of modernity.
Daniel Willard Fiske, who bequeathed the Fiske Icelandic Collection to
Cornell University, purchased over 400 prints from Howell around the turn
of the century. Halldór Hermannsson, the collection’s first
curator, mounted the prints around 1923 in six albums and supplied the
prints with captions. (A small group of photographs includes the work
of Henry A. Perkins, an American, and Magnús Ólafsson, an
Icelander.) In late 2000, a researcher in Iceland requested digital scans
of 95 of these photographs for a book on Howell. This rather large request
stimulated interest in digitizing the photographs held in the Fiske Collection,
thereby making the images available via the Internet and greatly facilitating
provision of printed copies for research and publication.
Introduction
Copyright
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