Archnet > Collection > International Tangier: Morocco & the Mediterranean in the early 20th c.

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Interior portrait of a soldier at attention, textiles decorate the walls. Probably Paul Servant.

View of two Europeans passing the facade

Exterior view of Place des Martyrs, with Djemaa el Djedid on the left.  The statue by Carlo Marochetti (Charles Marochetti) is of Ferdinand-Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, on a horse.  It was placed in front of the mosque in 1845, dismantled after independence in 1963 and sent to France.

Women and children in traditional Moroccan dress walk through Bab Haha toward the Place Mechouar; the entrance to York Castle on the left

Exterior view, European soldiers coming our of Bab al-Had

Regional Surveys

This collection currently contains approximately 2,000 images of the western Mediterranean, and particularly Tangier, Morocco, during the period in which the city truly was an International Zone. The images are believed to be the work of Spanish photographer and longtime resident of Tangier, Paul Servant. They document the city and multiple other locations in the region approximately between the last years of the 19th century and the 1930s. They are scanned from a large collection of medium-format, glass plate negatives in the collection of the Tangier American Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM). The images of Morocco, France, Spain, Algeria, Gibraltar, and other places, provide important and rare visual documentation of these places between the First and Second World Wars, when nearly every aspect of society was in flux. Tangier is particularly well documented. Images capture the arrival of Europeans in the port, construction of the railway, some of the city's best-known buildings, and a wide variety of the city's inhabitants, Moroccan and European, civilian and military. With the help of multiple institutions,1 most recently the Program in Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for Work and Service of Wellesley College, the entire collection is now digitized and catalogued to the best degree possible.

For reasons explained in the fuller history of the collection, many images are only partially identified, and some may even be misidentified. Do not hesitate to contact us if you are able to correct or provide further information on a photograph.

Organization of the Collection: The complete collection is now online. The organization of the virtual collection reflects the organization of the physical glass negative collection as it is stored. Images are presented in sub-collections corresponding to the numbered boxes in which they are stored. The contents of each box are summarized on the description page for each collection.

--Michael A. Toler, Archnet Content Manager (Updated October 8, 2016 )

1 For a fuller history and description of the project, see this page.