Photographs, Documents & Maps Fine Art

A star chart engraved in Leipzig in 1782, the constellations still hand colored. Antique maps, photographs and documents here run from European engravings to Indian story scrolls, Balinese calendars and Burmese fortune tellers’ books. Santhal pat scrolls from Jharkhand and Bihar, painted to accompany sung stories, hang near a Balinese palelintangan, the astrological calendar used to find auspicious days. A London map dated 1814 and Belgian brass rubbings on vellum and flocked paper fill out the older drawers.

Photography covers Cuba in color and sepia, a hand-colored print by Ray Jerome Baker, and Tom Rossiter’s Anthropocene Mountain series from 2020, framed in cedar. An album of Cuban collector cards and an aluminum print of a church in Gourdes, France, round out the corners. A framed map or pat scroll works well in a library or along a staircase, where people slow down to read. Every one of them is, in its way, a set of directions.