Cornell University Library Digital Collections

Icelandic and Faroese Photographs of Frederick W.W. Howell

About this collection

This collection contains digital surrogates of around 400 photographs of Icelandic and Faroese landscapes, farmsteads, towns, and people at the end of the nineteenth century created by British photographer Frederick W.W. Howell.

In late 2000, a researcher requested digital scans of 95 of these photographs for a book on Howell. This request stimulated interest in digitizing the photographs held in the Fiske Collection and led to their availability as an online digital collection.

Historical context

Daniel Willard Fiske, who bequeathed the Fiske Icelandic Collection to Cornell University, purchased over 400 prints from their creator, Frederick W.W. Howell around the turn of the twentieth century. Halldór Hermannsson, the collection’s first curator, mounted the prints around 1923 in six albums and supplied the prints with captions.

Using the collection

For more information about the collection, contact the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu.

More information

Collection steward
Patrick Stevens, Curator, Fiske Icelandic Collection
Metadata creation
Kenneth Baitsholts, 2001
Funding
Cornell University Library Internal Grants, funded 2001
Credits
This collection overview was adapted from the collection’s former website and was last reviewed in 2025.
Collection sources