Hamid Schricker Photographs

Photography taken by Mr. Schricker in Iran during the 1970s. His photography covers several topics: the opening of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in 1977, images of industrial buildings, and images of Iranian works of art from the Behshar Industrial Group and other artists. Materials consist of slides, positive film strips, transparencies, and negatives.

Schricker's collection of over 300 negatives provides a rare and critically important document of modern Iranian art and its context before the 1979 Revolution. Most of his subjects have been destroyed or their whereabouts are unknown. They include some of the leading Iranian modern artists and their works, the opening of the Tehran Museum of Modern Art, the lost art collection of the defunct industrial conglomerate Behshar, the first business entity in Iran to form an art collection. The gift also includes a series of images of factories built by German engineers in the art deco style under Reza Shah Pahlavi, which no longer exist. Many of Mr. Schricker's photographs have been published. The collection offers an invaluable resource for the further study of modern Iran, a subject that has received considerable attention recently, and its photography.

Hamid Schricker is an Iranian photographer, active in Tehran in the 1970s. He studied at Cambridge University and King's College London in the 1960s and returned to Iran where he was working as a photographer by 1974. Schricker currently lives in Toronto, ON.

Hamid Schricker Photographs

Gift of Hamid Schricker, 2019.

Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives

Collection descriptions

Archival materials

Hamid Schricker Photographs, FSA.A2017.04. National Museum of Asian Art Archives. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Hamid Schricker.

This collection is organized into two series: Series 1 Film Photography and Series 2 Digital Photography. Series 1 Film Photography is further arranged into three subseries: Subseries 1 Buildings and Architecture, Subseries 2 Opening of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, and Subseries 3 Artwork by Collection.

Permission to reproduce and publish an item from the Archives is coordinated through the National Museum of Asian Art's Rights and Reproductions department. Please contact the Archives to initiate this process.

Collection is open for research.