On exhibit in the Gunlocke Room this summer are The Photographs of Dorothy R. Miller: Visions of Arabia, 1947-1979. Since 2005, the highly acclaimed photographer from Santa Clara, California has donated to Georgetown more than 400 superb 8 x 10, black and white photographs taken during her many years living in Saudi Arabia, a country about which the Special Collections Research Center has significant collections.

Miller first went to Saudi Arabia in 1947 to work in oil company Aramco’s Law Department. In 1951, about the time she learned to do her own developing, she discovered that “people were paying more attention to my pictures and I was becoming conscious I should have more training.” Thus she left in 1959 to take an intensive sixmonth course in photography at the Brooks Institute in San Francisco. She returned to Saudi Arabia and Aramco in 1967 to work in the company’s Treasurer’s Organization, her enthusiasm for the country and photography unabated. Her images range from Aramco personnel and facilities, to Saudi people, to stunning scenes of countryside, to memorable images of sand, to nature studies of flowers, trees, and animals. She depicts Qatif and Hofuf, Dhahran and Dammam, al-Khobar and Abqaiq.

When she finally retired to the United States in 1977, Miller began to sort through her vast collection, first printing out the 10,000 negatives on contact paper, then choosing those to crop and print. She averaged four hours a day, three days a week, in her photo lab. The result is a timeless and enchanting record of a country in the 1950s and 1960s.

Guest Curator William F. Stapp, formerly Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, has mounted the exhibition of some 80 images. Although most are of Saudi Arabia in black and white (Ms. Miller’s dictum: In color you look for color ... In black and white, you work with light and shadow), there are a few in color of her trips to Petra. The library is hugely indebted to Dorothy Miller for the gift of the photographs and to Will Stapp for such an excellent exhibition.