Myron Bement Smith (1897–1970)

In Varamin: October 1934, April 1958
Repository: National Museum of Asian Art Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

Myron Bement Smith was born in Newark Valley, New York in 1897 and began his career as an architectural draftsman, with an interruption for service in the US Army Medical Corps during World War I. He enrolled at Yale University in 1922, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1926, after which he studied northern Italian brick and stonework for two years on a grant from the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (fig. 1). In 1929, he enrolled at Harvard University to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree.

In 1930, Smith began working at Arthur Upham Pope’s American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology. This served as his introduction to Persian art and architecture, which he began studying intently, along with the Persian language, at both Harvard and Columbia University. In 1933, he obtained a fellowship with the American Council of Learned Societies to study Islamic architecture in Iran. That year, he also married Katharine Dennis and together they moved to Iran, where they lived until 1937.

On returning to the United States, Smith published a series of academic articles. He ultimately received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, with a dissertation on the vault in Persian architecture. From 1938 until his death in Washington, DC in 1970, he held a variety of positions, including a long association with the Library of Congress, primarily as an honorary consultant, but also as the head of the Library’s Iranian section in 1943–44.

Smith first visited Varamin in October 1934 and then returned in April 1958. On the first trip, he photographed the congregational mosque, and also produced architectural drawings of it. During the second trip, which was connected to a United States Information Service lecture tour through the Middle East, Smith and an unknown colleague took about a dozen photographs of the congregational mosque, and Smith himself was photographed at work (fig. 2–4). Two photographs were also taken inside the Emamzadeh Yahya, including an important image of ritual objects (fig. 5). A stamp reading “Official Photograph U.S.I.S. Iran Press Section” appears on the reverse of his 1958 photographs.

Photography played an important role in Smith’s scholarship, and he developed a meticulous approach to his photo-documentation of architecture. He kept registers of his photographs, including his numbering system, the name of the site and point of view captured, and contact prints (fig. 5). He also stamped and labeled the backs of his prints and maintained logs with detailed technical information on each shot.

Anticipating the critical role of photography in scholarship, Smith conceived his own repository called the Archive for Islamic Culture and Art (or ‘the Islamic Archives’), with his own works as the core. He also sought to collect photographs by a wide range of other photographers and institutions working in the Islamic world. Mostly notably, in 1951, the Islamic Archives acquired all 695 surviving glass plate negatives from the studio of Antoin Sevruguin (d. 1933), one of the pioneers of photography in Iran. The Islamic Archives ultimately grew to include a range of additional materials, but its core remained photography.

After Myron’s passing, Katharine Dennis Smith sought a permanent home for the Islamic Archives. It was initially given to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in 1971. However, Katharine ultimately decided that the Freer Gallery of Art, also part of the Smithsonian, would be a more suitable home, and the collection transferred there in 1977. It has remained there since, moving into the National Museum of Asian Art Archives following its establishment in 1987.

Ryan Murray Archivist, National Museum of Asian Art

Citation: Ryan Murray, “Myron Bement Smith (1897–1970).” Photographers entry in The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: An Online Exhibition of an Iranian Shrine, directed and edited by Keelan Overton. 33 Arches Productions, January 15, 2025. Host: Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online.