Category: Area Studies, Geography, Cornell University, Iceland

Introduction At the end of the nineteenth century, the British artist, photographer and traveler Frederick W.W. Howell, F.R.G.S., recorded Icelandic and Faroese landscapes, farmsteads, towns and people in a remarkable series of photographs that depicted Iceland and the Faeroe Islands on the edge of modernity. Daniel Willard Fiske, who bequeathed the Fiske Icelandic Collection to Cornell University, purchased over 400 prints from Howell around the turn of the century. Halldór Hermannsson, the collection’s first curator, mounted the prints around 1923 in six albums and supplied the prints with captions. (A small group of photographs includes the work of Henry A.