Hold onto your hats, folks! You can now preview all of the featured items in our online and live auctions at our website.

The auction on October 4 is open to all who would like to attend! So bring yourself, and bring your friends! If you won’t be in New York, you can still bid on the items in the live auction using our absentee bid form. And of course, don’t forget to browse through the incredible selection of over 200 items in our online auction, which runs from September 27 through October 7 at iGavelauctions.com.

Email any and all questions and/or comments about the event or any of the featured items to me, and I will be happy to answer. Enjoy!

It’s hard to believe a week has gone by since Ken Burns and Geoff Ward were here at Eastman House to receive George Eastman Medals of Honor.  I’m not sure I’ve stopped smiling since then — listening to brilliant minds discuss their 28-year partnership was truly a privilege.  These two guys – who on the surface could not be more different – have forged a symbiotic relationship that has resulted in making American history come alive for millions of us. 

Ken Burns sitting for an interview in the Eastman House Terrace Garden

Geoff Ward with the George Eastman House Medal of Honor

George Eastman House Director Anthony Bannon introducing Burns and Ward 

I think many people know Ken Burns’ name: as director, his have been the key name and face identified with so many award-winning documentaries.  In person, he’s sprite-like, even jumping up on a chair when he gets intensely involved in working out details of a project.  He enjoys a crowd and is an eloquent extemporaneous speaker, stringing together words in magical sentences in ways most authors only dream of.

Fewer people know Geoff Ward’s name, which is part of the reason Eastman House wanted to jointly honor this dynamic duo.  Geoff has an unmatched ability to create the narrative arc of the stories the two work to relay…stories they admitted to not always having a shared passion for.  The Jazz series, Geoff told us, was a dream of his since he was nine years old, while Ken knew little about the subject.  The opposite was true of Baseball.   

Part of the charm of this event, I think, was the interplay between Ken and Geoff, who told me afterward they had never before had an opportunity to discuss their process in front of a group – to “bat things about onstage”, as Geoff described it.  And so the audience felt in the midst of a conversation among good friends.

Burns and Ward speaking to a sold-out audience in the Dryden Theatre 

There was something incredibly satisfying in learning that Ken and Geoff still do all their own original research.  They don’t send research assistants and interns out looking for photographs and moving images or subjects to interview.  They want to see that source material themselves; they fear that were someone to bring them 500 images from a cache of 1000 photographs, there might be one photograph that, had they seen it with their own eyes, would have given them a key story fragment.

Their process is convoluted, exhaustive and likely exasperating for those not intimately involved, for they don’t start with a script.  They start with a subject, and then seek to find anything and anyone that can shed light on the subject.  They don’t always know where they’re going, and they check their egos at the door, willing to also leave on the cutting room floor what one may have thought would be critical to the story early on.  The result is historical storytelling that catches us by surprise, even when we know history’s outcomes.  As Burns said, “We know Lewis and Clark got back.  We know the Union won the Civil War.  But if we tell the story well, the viewer can get caught up in the moment and forget that he knows where the story goes.  That’s when we know we’ve got it right.” 

One of my favorite moments of the evening was Geoff telling the audience about his time spent earlier in the day with Joe Struble, Archivist for our Photograph Collection.  Geoff is a Roosevelt scholar, and admits to being fairly obsessed with Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor (and is working now with Burns on creating a new documentary on the Roosevelts). He thought he had seen every photograph ever made of all three Roosevelts.  But in the space of 45-minutes, Joe brought out six photographs Geoff had never before seen, including photographs of Eleanor Roosevelt by Edward Steichen.  I, for one, will be looking for those Steichen photographs of Eleanor when the Roosevelt documentary airs several years from now.  And I’m guessing I’ll be on the edge of my seat, wondering whether FDR can actually get that New Deal through Congress. 

 Here’s to you, Ken and Geoff!  Thanks for giving all our guests an intimate look at your work, and thanks for helping promote civic values and civic action through your work.  George Eastman  himself would applaud your efforts. 

 Greeting fans at the post-presentation booksigning event

Editors Note: Visit our Ken Burns and Geoff Ward Facebook Photo Album  for more images of their visit.

Every year a small group of students in the spring semester of their second year of the Photographic Preservation and Collections Management (PPCM) program come together to curate a show of recent acquisitions at George Eastman House. This show is designed to illustrate the ways in which the George Eastman House collection is a “living” entity. How we interpret the mission of the museum, to tell the story of photography and motion pictures — “media that have changed and continue to change our perception of the world” — results in the acquisition of new objects that can reinforce strengths of the collection, or suggests new ways of interpreting items already in the collection.

PPCM students discuss sequencing pieces in the exhibition

As students studying the history of photography, we were interested in photographs that are slippery, that change meaning depending on where the image is first encountered or how it is presented. We are lucky at George Eastman House that we collect a large range of photographs, art and otherwise, that have had a multitude of meanings throughout their existence before entering our collection. Our title, Art/Not Art, refers to the polarizing question we often ask of photographs, is it art or is it not?

Many of the photographs shown in Art/Not Art are art photographs, according to our utilitarian definition of the term, as they were they bought, sold, exhibited, and written about as art. However, this contextual information is not immediately apparent when standing before these photographs. The diversity of practice in contemporary art photography is well represented in the exhibition—the four photographs from Elijah Gowin’s “Of Falling and Floating” series looks radically different from Robert and Sheena ParkeHarrison’s “Suspension,” which in turn bears little in common with Binh Danh’s contemporary daguerreotype, a portrait from the Tuol Seng Genocide Museum.

Robert and Sheena ParkeHarrison, SUSPENSION, From the Series: Earth Elegies, ca. 1999-2000

Perhaps Binh Danh’s daguerreotype should then be compared to Ron Haviv’s “Darfur Girl,” a large-scale chromogenic print depicting three girls searching for firewood near a displaced persons camp in Sudan. In the summer of 2005, UNICEF sponsored Haviv to document the conflict in Darfur’s effect on children. While the composition and the scale suggest that this piece is contemporary art photography, does the use of this image to raise funds for UNICEF mean that it cannot be considered art? And, if Binh Danh’s daguerreotype is art, does that label limit its ability to document genocide?

Ron Haviv, DARFUR GIRL 2005.

Many of the photographs shown in the exhibition have been published in different places, for reasons that are not obvious when looking at the photographs. Joel-Peter Witkin’s series, “A History of Hats in Art,” was initially printed in The New York Times Magazine as a series of fashion photographs featuring extravagant haute-couture headwear. Alex Webb’s “US/Mexico Border (San Ysidro, CA)” was printed in Harper’s Magazine on an article on illegal immigration published roughly fifteen years after the photograph was taken. E.J. Bellocq’s photographs are more mysterious. Bellocq, a commercial photographer from New Orleans in the early twentieth century, took a series of photographs of women from the city’s Storyville red light district. His negatives were discovered after his death, and purchased by Lee Friedlander who printed his images and popularized them as art objects in the 1970s.

This was the first show that many of us have curated, and our approach to the photographs is typical of the questions that we often ask ourselves as future professionals in our field. Given the care and attention that we must provide to each individual item that enters our collection—a process that includes accessioning the item, assessing its condition and recommending conservation work when required, housing the item according to archival standards, cataloguing the item into our electronic database, providing access to the public via the research archives and through exhibitions, and, finally, maintaining it in perpetuity in our ever-shrinking vault—the acquisition process is very rigorous, and very important. So, how best to show the diversity of material that eventually makes it into our collection?

As much as any lovers of photography, we were moved by how stunning some of the items collected in the past five years are. As students of photography, we were also interested in how slippery some of the meanings of the photographs were over time, and in different contexts. The range of aesthetics in art photography, and the different applications of photography, whether for fashion, photojournalism, or for more personal reasons, suggests the impossibility of just looking at a photograph to determine if it is art, or not art.

As future custodians of collections of photography, we encourage an approach to photography that understands the rare slipperiness of the medium of photography, where images and objects often have unknown and unexpected trajectories before they come to our attention as candidates for acquisitions.

What We’re Collecting Now: Art/Not Art was curated by Jami Guthrie, Emily McKibbon, Loreto Pinochet, Paul Sergeant, D’Arcy White, and Soohyun Yang. The exhibit is on view through October 24th.

My wife France and I were asked to come to the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock, England to teach ten participants from all over the world how to make Photogenic Drawings, negatives on paper sensitized with silver chloride. Yes, this is the place where 175 years ago today, the first photographic negative was invented by William Henry Fox Talbot.

Vintage salt print of Fox Talbot’s home.

Lacock Abbey as it looks today in the Cotswolds.

Today is the fourth day of the Dawn of Photography workshop being held at Lacock Abbey, Talbot’s home where he conducted his own experiments in the mid-1830s. [The abbey was also used for filming the Harry Potter movies, though this is an aside.] His early images were very colorful and not the dull brown of the later processes.

Illustrations of various kinds of salt stabilization.

Talbot used his process for making contact prints from leaves, lace and other thin objects but also made images using camera obscura as well.  A rare exhibition list of Talbot’s photogenic drawings dating August 1839 from the George Eastman House Richard and Roney Menschel Library collection gave important information regarding exactly which flowers and engravings Talbot actually used in contact with his sensitive paper. This information has allowed participants to search the grounds of the abbey for the same botanicals picked by Talbot in his original experiments.

Fox Talbot Museum curator Roger Watson has been giving tours and lectures about the history of this important site, and participants have been taking images around the grounds of the historic village of Lacock recreating the original scenes made by Talbot in the early 19^th century. Special cameras and lenses were esigned that all the participants are using and will eventually take with them after the workshop.

Mousetrap cameras that were constructed for this workshop.

This evening, we are in for a special treat in– the opening reception for the exhibit, Celebrating the Negative. It’s hard to believe that we are at this amazing site conducting this workshop and commemorating this special event.

For more on our Photography Workshop series, click here.

Editor’s note:  Many thanks to Stacey VanDenburgh, Manager of the
Kay R. Whitmore Conservation Center at George Eastman House, for all her help with this entry.

Among the dilapidated buildings of a decaying city, artists are beginning to adapt to their environment in new and creative ways. A recent article in the New York Times about Detroit summarizes a new wave of local artists and cultural organizations that are embracing the demise of their city with a frontier-like perspective.

Andrew Moore, one of the artists featured in our upcoming auction, has also done this. He has been exploring the architectural vestiges of Detroit in recent years, and his findings have become the topic of his latest photographic project Detroit Disassembled. Check him out in this video climbing through hollowed buildings and mounds of concrete and steel, like a photographic pioneer. Peacock Alley, one of my favorite images from this series, pays homage to the wreckage, and inspires me to think about how much spirit one place can hold onto, even when crumbling to pieces.