Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom have shared the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professorship of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College since 2000. Prior to that, they taught at several colleges and universities in the United States and Europe, and worked as independent scholars and editors. Their partnership began at Harvard University where they met as students in the 1970s.

Blair and Bloom have written individually and jointly about many aspects of Islamic art and architecture. Many of their early writings appeared in the journal Muqarnas. Together, they are the authors of The Art and Architecture of Islam: 1250-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press Pelican History of Art, 1994), Islamic Arts (London: Phaidon, 1997) and Islam: A Thousand Years of Faith and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Among Sheila Blair's other works are The Monumental Inscriptions from Early Islamic Iran and Transoxiana (Leiden: Brill, 1992), Compendium of Chronicles (London: The Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1995) and Islamic Inscriptions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). Among Jonathan Bloom's other books are Minaret: Symbol of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Paper Before Print (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), and Early Islamic Art and Architecture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

The photographs in the Blair and Bloom Collection were taken during several research trips and at different times. Thanks to generous grants from the Canada Council, Sheila Blair did her doctoral research in Iran, Afghanistan, and the then-Soviet Central Asia from 1976 to 1978, where she thoroughly documented monuments of the Islamic period. A very generous Fulbright-Hayes fellowship sent Jonathan Bloom to do his doctoral research in 1977-78 in many countries around the Mediterranean, where many of the other photographs were taken. Subsequent research trips that they made to Morocco and Soviet Central Asia in the 1980s also added to their rich collection of architectural photographs.

Thanks to their generous donation, the architectural slides of Professors Blair and Bloom will now be accessible on ArchNet in digital format. This collection contains over fourteen hundred images of monuments in Egypt, Iran and West Turkestan.

[Click on 'View Thumbnails' to view the entire collection, or click on any site name to view Blair and Bloom photographs along with other images and information. To sort images by site, location or country, simply click on the heading of the related column.]