Sinai. Interior of the Church of the Tranfiguration at the Monastery of St. Catherine

The G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection is a source of historical images of the Middle East. The majority of the images depict Palestine (present-day Israel and the West Bank) from 1898 to 1946. Most of the Library of Congress collection consists of over 23,000 glass and film photographic negatives and transparencies created by the American Colony Photo Department and its successor firm, the Matson Photo Service. The American Colony Photo Department in Jerusalem was one of several photo services operating in the Middle East before 1900. Catering primarily to the tourist trade, the American Colony and its competitors photographed holy sites, often including costumed actors recreating Biblical scenes. The firm’s photographers were residents of Palestine with knowledge of the land and people that gave them an advantage and made their coverage intimate and comprehensive. They documented Middle East culture, history, and political events from before World War I through the collapse of Ottoman rule, the British Mandate period, World War II, and the emergence of the State of Israel. The Matson Collection also includes images of people and locations in present-day Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. Additionally, the firm produced photographs from an East African trip. The collection came to the Library of Congress between 1966 and 1981, through a series of gifts made by Eric Matson and his beneficiary, the Home for the Aged of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Los Angeles (now called the Kensington Episcopal Home).

Byzantine architectural and visual style was a style that existed with remarkable homogeneity within the Eastern Roman empire between the 6th century and until the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. The Byzantine style's presence extended to Greece. Through Venetians, who became Constantinople's archrivals, it spread to Italy, and Sicily, where it persisted almost intact through the 12th century and became a foundation for the Italian Renaissance. Preserved by the Eastern Orthodox church, the Byzantine style spread to eastern Europe, the Balkans, and particularly to Russia, where it remained, with little or no local modification, through the 17th century. Byzantine architecture and painting remained uniform in tradition rather than changed with time and personal expression. The result is a sophistication of style and spiritual expression not paralleled in Western art. As with all large Picryl collections, this one is made with the assistance of AI image recognition. It allows collections of sizes never seen before. We do our best to clean after AI as it is based solely on visual resemblance and we apologize if we missed a few images in the collection that do not belong to the Byzantine style.