Collection Description

The John C. and Susan L. Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art contains more than 210,000 original slides and photographs taken by the Huntingtons over nearly fifty years of photographic documentation of art and architecture throughout Asia. Countries covered in the collection include India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma), China, Korea, and Japan. The documentation covers in situ works of art and architecture ranging from approximately 2500 B.C.E. to the present, as well as Asian works found in major Asian, European, and American museums. This broad, yet detailed collection emphasizes Buddhist material culture, but also includes Hindu, Jain, Islamic, Christian, and secular works as well. Among the highlights of The Huntington Archive are exhaustive coverage of Nepali art and architecture, thorough documentation of the art of Alchi in the western Himalayas, and comprehensive photography of the art of the Pala period in eastern India and Bangladesh.

A Brief History

The Huntington Archive represents the efforts of nearly fifty years of field documentation photography by John and Susan Huntington, formerly professors of Asian Art History at The Ohio State University. In 1986, the Department of History of Art received a major grant from the Ohio Board of Regents to fund staff, space, and equipment to create a facility that would make these original photographs available to the public for scholarly research and teaching. In 2016, the Archive's physical collection moved to the University of Chicago, where work on the digital collection is conducted today.

Founding Directors

John C. Huntington and Susan L. Huntington

John C. Huntington in Sri Lanka, 1984, doing field research.

JOHN C. HUNTINGTON, PH.D., dedicated nearly 50 years of his life to the study of Buddhist art. John was Co-founding Director (with Susan L. Huntington) of the Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art. His background as a professional photographer and his avid interest in documenting virtually every work of Asian art he encountered led to the detailed coverage represented in the Archive’s photographs.

John’s primary academic interests included the communicative values of the various art forms, how the arts set the stage for Buddhist attainment for the practitioner, and the practice methodologies that involve art as part of rituals. He taught at The Ohio State University from 1970 until his retirement in 2013. During his time there he built a flourishing program in Asian art history, and mentored dozens of graduate students. His main scholarly contributions include his doctoral dissertation, The Styles and Stylistic Sources of Tibetan Painting, a pioneering study that was foundational to development of the field of Tibetan studies; The Phur-pa, Tibetan Ritual Daggers; and The Circle of Bliss: Buddhist Meditational Art. He was also a contributor to The Art of Ancient India by Susan L. Huntington. In addition to these major publications, John authored dozens of scholarly articles. For John's major academic contributions, please see https://osu.academia.edu/JohnHuntington.

As a professor at The Ohio State University, John received numerous distinctions for both his teaching and research. Many of John's teaching materials and the extraordinary graphics he created to illustrate concepts in Buddhist iconography are included on the Archive's website under Educational Resources.

The Archive is saddened to report that John passed away on November 28, 2021.

Donations to continue John’s work can be made to the John C. and Susan L. Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art at the University of Chicago, using information at https://dsal.uchicago.edu/huntington_archive_fund_donations.html/.

Susan L. Huntington, at Deogarh, 1980, doing field research.

SUSAN L. HUNTINGTON, PH.D., is co-Founding Director of the archive and current Director. With her husband, John Huntington, she conducted extensive field research and photo-documentation of the art of Asia. A summary of her academic work appears below.

Current Staff

Susan L. Huntington

Susan L. Huntington, Ph.D., Director of Huntington Archive, is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, at The Ohio State University in Columbus. A specialist in the art of South Asia, her main publications include The Art of Ancient India; The "Pāla-Sena" Schools of Sculpture; Leaves from the Bodhi Tree; Lay Ritual in the Early Buddhist Art of India, as well as numerous articles on a variety of topics. Over the course of her career, Dr. Huntington has received many awards and grants from prestigious sources such as the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Award program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution. From the Ohio State University Dr. Huntington has received the Distinguished Scholar Award, the Distinguished University Professorship, and two awards for outstanding teaching. In 1998, Dr. Huntington was the Numata Distinguished Visiting Professor at Bailliol College at Oxford University and in 2005 she was the Mary Jane Crowe Visiting Professor at Northwestern University. For the 2011-2012 academic year, Dr. Huntington was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on an award funded by the Mellon Foundation. Dr. Huntington has advised many master’s and doctoral students, most of whom are now active scholars and teachers in the field of South Asian art in universities and museums throughout the country. She has also served as an officer and/or Board member of numerous national and international societies and committees, including the American Committee for South Asian Art, the Association for Asian Studies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Fulbright Award Committee, the College Art Association, and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.

James Nye

James Nye is Co-Project Director for current Archive projects. He is Director of the Digital South Asia Library, an associate of the Humanities Division, and is the retired Bibliographer for Southern Asia at the University of Chicago. Trained as a classical Indologist with an emphasis on medieval Sanskrit literature, his most recent externally funded projects focus on dictionaries for South Asian languages, sonic and visual South Asia, and the Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art. He served for fifteen years as Director of the University’s South Asia Language and Area Centre and for three years as Director of the South Asia Language Resource Centre, both of which were U.S. National Resource Centers.

Gregory Shonk

Gregory Shonk serves as Director of Collections for the Archive and became Curator of the Huntington Archive in 2010. His main responsibilities have included the supervision of the digitization of photographs and digital image correction, the organization, storage and management of digital assets, and the standardization, enhancement and remediation of metadata. He holds a Bachelors degree in Studio Art, and two Masters degrees, one in Library and Information Science and one in East Asian Studies. During his studies, he took History of Art classes in the art of Asia, writing a Master's thesis on an art-historical topic.

Ankur Desai

Ankur Desai serves as Associate Director of Content Management for the Huntington Archive and has worked with the collection since 2010. He received his PhD in South Asian art history at The Ohio State University under the guidance of Professors Susan L. and John C. Huntington. During his time at OSU between 2009-2018, he concurrently worked on various projects for the Archive, including the complete digitization of the photographs in the collection.

At The University of Chicago

Intellectual and administrative leadership for the Huntington Archive is provided under the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS) and other parts of the Division of the Humanities by:

• Trevor Price, principal investigator for projects funded by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation supporting the Archive, former COSAS Chair, and Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolution;
• Rashmi Joshi, COSAS Associate Director; and
• Charles Cooney, technical consultant and developer for the Archive and member of the University's ARTFL Project.

Acknowledgments

The Archive is grateful for Archives staff members whose efforts furthered work on the collection while it was at The Ohio State University from 1986 to 2016. Particular thanks are due to the late Dina Bangdel, the late Dana Ugolini, Janice Glowski, Cathleen Cummings, Aimee Phillips, Kyle Mullins, Jade Tran, and the many students who worked in the Archive over the years. The Archive is also grateful to the History of Art department chairs, particularly Christine Verzar, whose vision and efforts made the Archive a reality, as well as Deans who supported the Archive and its projects while at Ohio State. Our thanks are also due to Professor Christian Wedemeyer at the University of Chicago, whose idea it was to move the Archive from Ohio to Chicago, and to Bridget Madden, Associate Director of the Visual Resources Center at the University of Chicago for her invaluable work on the Archive data structure.

Copyright & Fair Use

UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED, all images in The Huntington Archive Digital Database Collection are copyright protected to a specific copyright holder, who is noted in the database. Applicable law prohibits unauthorized use or electronic dissemination. The images are for educational and research use only. Please contact the Huntington Archive for permission to re-publish or commercially disseminate any material.

This web page may be linked to other educational and research web pages; permission is required for any other purposes. The contents, however, may not be altered. Note that the information contained within all Huntington Archive web pages is under copyright.