Every year George Eastman House welcomes hundreds of researchers interested in our collections; we host photo historians, curators, students, scientists, and hobbiests from all over the world. Often they are experts in the field and we get to learn a thing or two about our  collection. A few weeks ago a former professor of mine was here to look at our collection of Megalethoscope slides.  Antonella Pelizzari teaches History of Photography at Hunter College in NYC and is an old friend of Eastman House. She is currently working on a book on  Photography  and Italy and traveled to Rochester to research and look at our collection of Megalethoscope slides. I was familiar with these delightful objects before Antonella’s visit, but I didn’t realize that we have one of the largest collections of Megalethoscopes in the world. I also learned a bit about how they work and how they are constructed, which I will share here.

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We have two big  exhibitions  going up this week, which means adrenaline is flowing and the creative services team is working long hours.  

Nature as Artifice

The first of the two  exhibitions,  Nature as  Artifice, originated in the Netherlands and was curated by Maartje van den Heuvel. Nature as Artifice  looks at the dichotomy between the perception, inspired by  the tradition of Dutch landscape painting,  of an idyllic agrarian Dutch landscape and the reality of the planned, manipulated landscape for which the Netherlands is known today.  The show features work by many well known  contemporary  Dutch artists including Hans Aarsman, Wout Berger, Cary Markerink and Theo Baart, Edwin Zwakman, Marnix Goossens, Frank van der Salm and others.  The photographs in this  exhibition  are spectacular–there really is something to be said about Dutch light.  

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Joe Struble, Archivist of the photography collection, periodically calls curatorial staff into the print room for “art moment”. This happens when something rare or extraordinary is pulled for photography, research, cataloging or conservation. The object might be going back into its box again for years so we like to take the opportunity to  appreciate  it. Last Friday Joe called “art moment” and we all gathered around this odd deer leg lamp with photo-offset lithograph shade.  

Unidentified photographer, Deer Lamp, ca. 1965, photo-offset lithograph, Gift of Geoffrey Batchen

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One of the greatest films made about life in Hollywood is the 1937 masterpiece A Star Is Born. The nitrate print in the Eastman House Collection was on the top of my list of ‘films to inspect’ this week at the Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center.  
Showcasing the talents of Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, director William Wellman tells the story of a small town girl who makes it big in the glamorous world of Hollywood.   Basing many scenes on real-life incidents of film stars such as Norma Shearer and John Barrymore, Wellman gives an insider look at what is means to be famous.

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As custodians of the collections at George Eastman House part of our mandate is to make sure the material in our care is preserved for future generations.  This tenet has been drilled into my brain since my education began, but regardless of my status as museum worker, it has never been easy for me to throw away or destroy a photograph.

Recently I was doing some housekeeping in the  Department  of Photographs and came across a box of  8 x 10 copy prints made at GEH back before digital. The prints were nice gelatin silver copies of authentic Ansel Adams photographs held in the collection, and were probably made for a curator to aid in planning an  exhibition or publication.  What do we do with them?

They are not collection material and and we would not want them to show up outside the museum and be mistaken for original Ansel Adams photographs. So after some hesitation, and perhaps a little soul searching, I decided to shred them. And it was kind of fun.