A new collection of color photographs from the early 1960s—the Charles T. Stifter Collection—is now available on the AAR Library’s online platform, the Digital Humanities Center. The collection consists of color slides of Italy, Greece and Crete, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Bulgaria photographed between 1961 and 1963.
Born in 1935 in Detroit, Charles T. Stifter is an architect whose career spanned the academic and professional worlds. After the University of Chicago, he worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and upon graduation from MIT for Eero Saarinen. In 1961 he was awarded a Fulbright Grant and the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. During his period at the Academy, he had the chance to travel, the photographs of his travels became the content of this collection.
Stifter told the Academy about his experiences traveling and photographing sites: “Italy was then in the infancy of its transformation from an agrarian to a modern economy (the ‘Italian Miracle’). Greece and Turkey were stressfully changing governments as Yugoslavia and Bulgaria displayed different versions of communism. The collection offers a momentary glance of places and people at that time. A significant portion of the photos in the Italian section are of travels into remote regions of Umbria to ancient Lucania. Barely affected by the changes in the north, the hill towns, small villages, and countryside of these regions offered frequent glimpses of life and land as it might have been seen hundreds of years earlier. The images of Greece contain well known but at the time often infrequently visited archeological sites. In the Aegean, Crete, and Mikonos had yet to experience any significant postwar growth. Travel to coastal Yugoslavia was constrained by poor roads; an inland trip to Turkey passed through Bosnia and Bulgaria where photography was not encouraged.”
Browse photographs in the Charles T. Stifter Collection.
