George Eastman House Blog

The 6Sight Summit drew leaders in digital imaging from round the world recently for a two day exchange in Monterey, and I had an opportunity to share news about the Leadership Award George Eastman House received from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. The award will allow the Conservation Department at the Museum to create a modified Wiki that we will design and organize to share information on the material aspects of the photograph – information equally necessary to the connoisseur, the collector and the conservator. Click here to read my remarks. The announcement attracted press attention right away, which showed me the general interest in organizing and distributing information about our material culture.

Alexis Girard, leader and founder of 6Sight and its parent institution, Future Image, is organizing a significant gift to Eastman House of early digital imaging hardware and software and associated materials, such as manuals and workbooks. This gift, planned for next year, will point to the need for another Wiki, complimentary to the Wiki on the materiality of the photograph. In fact, the rich and deep documentation that will accompany the Girard gift of pioneer digital objects will create a foundation for data we anticipate will be submitted to the Wiki on digital imaging. Eastman House now has set out to raise funds necessary for both the digital and the legacy Wiki, a task that will be made easier through our association with Future Image.

I had the good fortune to meet Pierre Barbeau, one of the men who worked on the creation of the cell phone camera at Sprint. In promising his collection of early cell phone camera research materials to Eastman House, Pierre pointed out how quickly these histories of advances in digital imaging come upon us and then as quickly recede behind the next quantum leap in the field, validating the need for a Wiki to collect data about the formation of these technologies, before they are lost or overlooked.

Look to the reports on the talks at 6Sight, and connect to the links that explain and demonstrate advances at Kodak, Microsoft, Adobe, and so many other exciting and interesting emerging businesses. Alexis Gerard - with his collaborators, Ted Fox, executive director of Photo Marketing Association, and Kim Toren-Freeman, president of the Association of Imaging Executives – pointed out that the transformation brought about in image-making by digital technologies (amplified by the fusion of imaging with the Internet and wireless telecommunications) “is reaching a watershed point. Never before,” they continued, “has imaging been put to such a diversity of uses, across such diverse geographies.”

So much of what is being done is done in the name of the amateur image-maker. This has been a fascinating return to the priority of the amateur in photography that fueled the turn of the 19th into the 20th century — women and children with Brownie cameras in their hands. My remarks can be read by clicking here, and I would be pleased to hear your ideas on the subject.