The Colbert Held Archive at the Middle East Institute is an impressive and unique collection of over 18,000 color Kodachrome slides donated by Colbert Held in 2014. A former foreign service officer and later professor of political geography, cultural geography, and Middle East history at Baylor University, Held captured a stunning variety of photographs of the Middle East during his many travels to the region between 1957 and 2005. While frequently focusing on geography, infrastructure, and landscape photography often from an aerial perspective, Held also documented the quotidian lives of the region’s inhabitants with portraits, cityscapes, and cultural studies.