Stanley Kerr Photographs (1919–1920)

Stanley Elphinstone Kerr (1894–1976) served as a volunteer with Near East Relief from 1919 to 1922, initially assigned to Aleppo as a clinical biochemist and sanitary officer, where he also worked as a photographer and helped recover Armenian children from Kurdish and Turkoman households. In the autumn of 1919, he transferred to Marash (Kahramanmaras), where he headed American relief operations during the Franco-Turkish conflict and the siege of January–February 1920, in which an estimated 9,000 of the city’s 20,000 Armenians perished. After the French evacuation, Kerr remained with the surviving Armenian population before departing with the last group of orphans in 1922. He later published The Lions of Marash (1973), a detailed account of these events.

The photographs in this selection document NER personnel and operations in Marash and Cilicia during 1919–1920, including group portraits of relief workers and missionaries with annotated identifications by Kerr, the American compound where Armenians sheltered during the siege, structural damage from the bombardment, the French and British military presence, and the conditions under which relief workers traveled and operated. A small number of images depict Aintab (Gaziantep) during the November 1919 British-to-French troop exchange.

His letters are presented in a companion collection. Kerr’s photographs and papers are held at the Zoryan Institute, Toronto.