Greetings!
For the next four weeks I will be writing from Canberra, Australia, where I will be working at the National Film and Sound Archive. These blog posts will give you chance to follow along as I meet the staff of the archive, as well as take a closer look at their film collection.
Please join me on my journey through this great collection of Australian Heritage!
Here is another sneak peek of some gems from the collection that will be on view during the Where We Live exhibition this Fall. This selection shows 3 of the 54 Autochromes by Charles C. Zoller (American 1854-1934) that will be reproduced and displayed for the exhibition. Autochromes are extremely sensitive to light so we are not able to exhibit the original object for any length of time. To work around this limitation we are making reproductions on transparency material and will display it on a large wall mounted lightbox. Nothing can recreate the experience of looking at the original object, but the display will be fabulous; seeing Rochester in color in the early 1900 hundreds is pretty cool! The collections at George Eastman House holds approximatly 4000 Autochromes by amateur photographer and Rochesterian, Charles Zoller.
THE PRISONER OF ZENDA (1937) directed by John Cromwell and starring Ronald Coleman, Madeleine Carroll, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is based on the 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda: Being the History of Three Months in the Life of an English Gentleman by Anthony Hope. It is the story of King Rudolf V (Ronald Coleman) who, the night before his coronation, meets a man who is identical to himself. 
As they toast their shared ancestors, the king falls ill, and the look-alike takes his place on the throne until he recovers. 
Along the way, the look-alike falls for the lovely Princess Flavia (Madeleine Carroll), the king’s intended. She finds the “new king” much kinder and begins to love him in return.
Watching the film, some in the audience may think to themselves “Hey, this sounds a lot like the movie DAVE (1993) starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver” and you would be right-up to a point. Here the plot changes and THE PRISONER OF ZENDA becomes more of an adventure story with sword fights, castles, and dungeons.
THE PRISONER OF ZENDA was a box office hit when released, giving producer David O. Selznick his second hit that year (the first was A STAR IS BORN with Janet Gaynor and Frederic March.)
Accepted by the acquisitions committee, these elements make up a complete nitrate print, with material created in 1937 and 1945. While the material is brittle due to the age, the shrinkage is very low, and the image quality is good. Long term cold storage will ensure this print will last for years to come.
Right now we are all working on the Fall show, Where We Live, that celebrates Rochester’s 175th Birthday. The exhibition is full of great photographs of our fair city, with a fun mix of objects from the collection, as well as contemporary work by local artists, submissions from ordinary Rochesterians, and of course, postcards. We have a lot of postcards in the collection and they are fascinating. I love looking at the idealized visions of place and reading the snippets of news or anecdote scrawled on the back. Postcards are fun, collectable and can teach us a little bit about travel, tourism and social history. As part of Where We Live Eastman House is going to display close to 100 postcards of Rochester from the early 1900’s to the present and I’ve selected a few to preview on the blog.
I love how turquoise Eastman House used to be!
“Rhubarb” is British theatrical slang for the undistinguishable babble you might hear in a busy pub, but it is also the name of the International Photographic Festival held annually in Birmingham, UK, from which I have just returned. There were lots of memorable exhibitions including Nadav Kander’s portrait series, Obama’s People, currently breaking all attendance records at the Birmingham Art Museum. The long weekend began with a lively debate titled “Photography is Dead.” The panel was ably chaired by Stephen Mayes, CEO of the VII photo agency in New York, and included, in addition to myself, Jon Levy, publisher of the London based magazine of photojournalism and documentary photography, Foto8; MaryAnn Camilleri of Magenta Publishing for the Arts, a Toronto-based foundation specializing in emerging Candian artists; John Cross of Peter Bailey Company photo agency; and photographer Brian Griffin. Conclusion? “Photography is dead. Long live photography.” and that technical matters can change everything about image capture except its cultural meaning and our desire to do it.
The heart of this event is the international reviews: three days in which more than 30 curators, publishers, gallerists and critics representing ten different countries meet one-on-one with twelve artists a day to see and discuss new work. It’s a remarkable experience; the energy level is high, as is the quality of work. I thought our readers might like to see some of the variety of work that caught my eye.
Kurt Tong is a young British artist from Hong Kong who has photographed the marvelous paper objects representing such things as cars, fountain pens and ipods that are traditionally burned at Chinese funerals. He uses the simplest photographic style imagineable, but the theoretical implications of photographing simulacra are not lost on him or the viewer.
Edmund Clark is a well known British photojournalist who has just returned from Guantanamo. He documents both the prison and the navy base that supports it, giving us solid visual images by which to understand this dark and mysterious American place.
James Morris’s recent work in Iran is a study of both landscape and people, like Ed Clark, giving us a picture of a place we now barely know.
I loved Marko Dutka’s Portrait of Genius, photos of striking eighty-something artist’s model Daphne Self after self-portraits by Titian, Dürer, Rembrandt and others. Dutka’s comments on gender and power are brilliantly embedded in his strong and beautifully lit images.
As we concluded in our panel, photography is alive and well. I think anyone looking at these photographs would agree.