For more about Graham Nash’s visit:

Listen In to a podcast of his Dryden Theatre talk.

See highlights from his George Eastman Honorary Scholar award ceremony on our You Tube Channel.

Browse our Facebook Photo Album.

View ‘Graham Nash Becomes Eastman House Honorary Scholar’ video clip on Rochester YNN.

I saw parts of the Eastman House in different ways this past weekend, as photographer and musician Graham Nash shared with me what he was seeing throughout the mansion and museum, through his keen and creative photographer’s eye. He was intrigued by Eastman House, from the architecture to the collections, engaging with our conservators and archivists to learn more about daguerreotypes and photograph conservation.

Graham Nash with the framed art awarded to him upon receiving the title of George Eastman Honorary Scholar, presented by Tony Bannon, the Ron and Donna Fielding Director of George Eastman House, and Lisa Brubaker, an officer of the Easmtan House Board of Trustees.

Graham joined us, accompanied by his son, Will, to receive the title of George Eastman Honorary Scholar, for his contribution to photography as an artist and innovator.

He told the sold-out audience, “To be standing here today at George Eastman House is totally, totally amazing. This is an incredible honor. I’ve been a photographer longer than I’ve been a musician and my first passion is photography.”

Director Tony Bannon introduces Graham Nash before the press conference in the “Taking Aim” gallery.

If it were only through Graham’s music – his lyrics, his arrangements, his compositions –we might say and agree he has made an important part of the culture of our time. But let’s add to that an estimable career as a photographer, one who has imaged the music scene but also the totality of life around us.

While best known for his legendary music career with Crosby, Stills, and Nash as well as The Hollies, for which he has been inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Graham has been taking pictures for more than 50 years and collecting photographs since the 1970s. His visit to Eastman House was timed to coincide with the museum’s current display of the “Taking Aim” rock-photo exhibition he curated.

In the photography archives at Eastman House, Graham and Will experienced the earliest daguerreotype of Daguerre himself (1844) and a daguerreotype of an American cemetery in Shimoda, Japan, believed to be the earliest photographic image of Japan (1855). In the Kay R. Whitmore Conservation Lab, they witnessed a demonstration of a device that detects and maps an image formed on a daguerreotype 170 years ago, even though the original image has long since faded away.

Moved by these experiences, Nash was outspoken at both a press conference and the audience in encouraging support for Eastman House, calling the museum “a complete jewel that is preserving our collective physical and visual memory.”

Graham’s passion for fine-art photography led him to establish Nash Editions, a pioneering and celebrated printmaking studio that produces state-of-the art digital images for a long list of master photographers and artists. Eastman House created and debuted the world premiere of Nash Editions’ “Digital Frontiers” exhibition in 1998. Eastman House toured the exhibition, curated by Therese Mulligan, internationally for five years.

For this pioneering work in photography, The Smithsonian Institution cited Nash Editions for its role in the invention of digital fine-art printing upon acquiring the company’s original equipment and ephemera in 2005. And for services to music and charitable activities, the British-born superstar was named in 2010 an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by the Queen of England.

Film Noir has always stood with one foot firmly entrenched in literature. Early films noir based on novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and W.R. Burnett were the shining beacons of a new kind of crime film, while the term itself suggests ties to gothic Roman noir novels of the early 20th century and was inspired by the French Série noire reprints of hard-boiled novels in the 1940s.

Film noir’s style and content not only reflected the malaise of post-war letdown, it also insprired filmmakers to tell their stories in new ways, bringing about a classic period of filmmaking and providing the starting point for several offshoots into neo-noir.

Bogie and the famous bird from John Huston’s film noir masterpiece THE MALTESE FALCON (1941).

But it also inspired writers in the way they told their stories. The transformative mixture of hard-boiled content and filmic style created an atmosphere that authors have been striving to capture for decades. It is with this in mind that in January and February, the Dryden Theatre is presenting four contemporary authors (Shamus-winning author Sean Chercover, Turner Classic Movies’ scholar Shannon Chute, Edgar-winner Megan Abbott, and Edgar-nominated author Charles Benoit) inspired by the same films that inspire all of us. It is also a great reason to screen the well-known greats (The Maltese Falcon, Mildred Pierce, Gilda, The Asphalt Jungle) alongside little-seen films from the classic period (including a Don Siegel double feature: The Lineup and The Big Steal)— and talk about all things noir.

Last Thursday was a day in history that even Paul Simon longed wouldn’t happen as he sang “Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.”

It was the final day Kodachrome was being accepted for processing anywhere in the world, as Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, had the glory of being the final lab to create those “nice bright colors … greens of summers … (that make) you think all the world’s a sunny day” (as per Simon’s lyrics). And these final hours of processing — expected to be completed this week — take place 75 years after Kodachrome was unveiled in 1935.

Envelopes filled with rolls of Kodachrome arrived from around the globe, as media from around the globe also descended upon Dwayne’s to capture this moment in history. Many of these media folks also contacted George Eastman House — including CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC World News, The New York Times, and Al Jazeera — to obtain related photographs to illustrate news stories and to speak with an expert who could put this pop-culture icon known as Kodachrome into context. That expert was Eastman House’s curator of technology, Todd Gustavson (who conducted countless interviews during his holiday vacation.)

The passing of Kodachrome has been news, of course, since Kodak announced in 2009 the end of the film’s production, due to dwindling sales and the difficulty photographers had having it processed. Kodak decided the final roll would be given to National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry, who will give these prints to George Eastman House later this year. He chose New York City and India as the backdrop for these precious 36 frames.

Why was Kodachrome so popular? Well, the search to produce stable and permanent images in natural color dates to the very beginning of photography. Fast-forward to April 1935, when Kodak introduced Kodachrome film. It was considered by many the first modern multi-layer color transparency film. First rolled out as an amateur 16mm ciné film, the still photography version became available in September of the next year in 35mm and 828 roll film sizes. Larger sheet film was offered to the professional beginning in 1938, although Kodachrome was the film that brought color photography to the amateur photographer.

Countless baby-boom families documented their personal histories, birthdays, graduations, holidays, and vacations on Kodachrome, creating slide-shows, projected with their Kodaslide projectors to show off imagery to friends and relatives. Its brilliant colors were also highly popular with magazine photographers. National Geographic used it exclusively for more than half a century.

Kodachrome was the culmination of many years of investigation, with the research preformed by two professionally trained musicians, pianist Leopold Godowsky, Jr. and violinist Leopold Mannes, who Kodak moved to Rochester in 1930 to work on the project. Their research papers, along with many Kodachrome artifacts, are in the archives at Eastman House.

The finished product was a film like no other. This multi-layer film contained no dye couplers, but rather the color dyes were added to the appropriate film layer during processing. Processing the film in this manner gave Kodachrome images their unique saturated color look, and created a very stable fade resistant color images.

“With a production life span of nearly 75 years, Kodachrome was one of the longest-lived of the light-sensitive products,” Gustavson said. “Its name was geographically memorialized with Utah’s Kodachrome Basin State Park, idealized by the Paul Simon song of the same title. Kodachrome, like the Barbie doll and Schwinn Sting-Ray, became a pop-culture icon product of the twentieth century. This shouldn’t be looked at as a sad day, but rather as a celebration of Kodachrome.”

And we’ll let Paul take us out …

 “I love to take a photograph

 so, mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.

 Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome,

 Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome,

 Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.”

We rang in the New Year at the Dryden Theatre with Jon Moses and Albert Birney’s The Beast Pageant. Here the filmmakers take us through their journey to create the ‘strangest — and most tuneful —folk avant-garde dispatch of recent years’:

In 2005 we visited the Dryden Theater to see the great filmmaker Walter Murch discuss sound and film editing. We were so inspired we decided to move here. We got jobs at the theater selling tickets and popcorn. One day while squeezing coconut butter into the popcorn machine The Beast Pageant quest was born.

We had no idea what we were doing. The story emerged from sharing dreams and playing Nintendo. We wrote the script on back porches over many early mornings. We found our 16mm Bolex camera in a dumpster behind a Hospital in Baltimore. We filled an entire basement full of broken televisions, abandoned computers, creepy mannequins, and tons of rusty scrap metal. When it was time to begin shooting we rented a small, one room studio in an old brick building a few blocks from where we live. Our studio was surrounded by cabinet and chair builders so we shot at night when it was quiet.

Rochester was the perfect place to make The Beast Pageant. There are trees, you can see the sky, and there are plenty of sad decaying factories crying to be captured on film. Since Kodak is based here we were able to buy, develop and transfer the film locally. We had a budget of zero dollars. We would save up money for a few weeks, buy film, and then save up for the next batch. We found most of the props and costumes in the garbage. A friend was renovating a house so we got old floor boards, sinks and doors. We built the sets with paper-mâché, cardboard and discarded wood. Our crew was a beautiful bunch of friends that we met around town. Actors were plucked from the Dryden lobby. Making the film was like solving a giant hairy puzzle. We constantly edited and welcomed the happy accidents along the way. The Beast Pageant felt like a living thing, an organic master telling us what it wanted, making unusual demands like gathering pounds of dead fish and being covered in cottage cheese. It constantly changed and evolved until the end product was clear and the monster was alive!

Jon Moses, Albert Birney… and where it all began.

 See The Beast Pageant – Trailer from Jubadaba on Vimeo.