About Collection

The Josephine Powell Slide Collection includes the professional works of freelance photographer and kilim researcher Josephine Powell from the period of her work in Türkiye. Although she regretted not starting to take pictures of Turkish nomads and villagers until late in her life, she still travelled extensively around the country between 1974 and 1994, amassing a huge archive of photos (approximately 30.000 images) concentrating on village and nomadic lifestyles. Six thousand of these photographs are of textiles; the rest are of the daily life of villagers and nomads, primarily people who worked with textiles. Thirty volumes of field notes documenting these trips are also included in the collection. Her interest in weaving in particular resulted in photography and field notes of special interest to textile scholars. Her notes comment on and explain the ethnographic perspective, among other topics of interest to the broader scholarly community.

Another part of the archive consists of audiovisual fragments which show her wide geographic interest as well. These consist of images of priceless textiles and ethnographic recordings about them and their manufacture from a region spanning from Central Asia to Türkiye.

In her travels, Powell never stopped collecting any and all kinds of artefacts used by Anatolian people for the purposes of agriculture and other daily tasks. Today, the results of her extensive efforts to collect ethnographic objects belong to the Sadberk Hanım Museum, in Büyükdere, İstanbul. This collection of objects includes over 400 flatweaves and more than 1.000 wooden and metal artefacts.