Happy New Year!
Victor Keppler (American, 1904-1987), New Year’s Eve and Time Square, ca.1950, Kodachrome transparency.
Jessica Johnston's Posts
Jessica Johnston is an Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs at George Eastman House. She manages numerous exhibitions and projects at the museum including our recent participation on the Flickr Commons.
Christmas Sampler from the Archive
Nickolas Muray (American 1892-1965), AMERICAN CYANAMID, 1945, Carbro print, © Estate of Nickolas Muray
Nickolas Muray (American 1892-1965) A&P COFFEE, SANTA CLAUS, 1958, Carbro print, © Estate of Nickolas Muray
Born in Hungary in 1892, Nickolas Muray immigrated to the United States in 1913, working first as a printer and then opening a photographic portrait studio in
Greenwich Village in 1920. He became well known for his celebrity portraits, publishing them regularly in Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The New York Times. After 1930, Muray turned away from celebrity and theatrical portraiture, and became a pioneering commercial photographer, famous for establishing many of the conventions of color advertising. He is considered the master of the three-color carbro process.
A colorful and charismatic character, Muray was a pilot, a member of the US Olympic fencing team, and the long-time lover of Frida Kahlo, whom he regularly photographed in some of his best-known work. He was a distinguished art collector, best known for his collection of twentieth-century Mexican paintings, and a regular columnist for the magazine Dance.
In 1974, Muray’s archive was donated to George Eastman House. The gift included approximately 25,000 images including photographic prints, negatives, transparencies and advertising tear sheets.
New Topographics Smackdown!
A colleague sent me a link to a blog post featuring this hilarious New Topographics T Shirt. We all want one!
The shirt was designed by Blake Andrews.
Tulips and Hyacinths and Daffodils, Oh My!
Every fall volunteers gather in the Eastman House barn to plant bulbs in preparation for the upcoming winter’s Dutch Connection! This year we had a great turnout and can’t wait to see the bulbs come to life in 2010.
Inspired by a bulb order placed by Mr. Eastman over 100 years ago, this yearly offering of flowers in Feburary is a welcome respite from the Rochester winter. It features more than 2,000 tulips, hyacinths, daffodils, freesias, and amaryllis in bloom in the Eastman House conservatory.
Please think about becoming a member or volunteering at George Eastman House!
It’s fall and students are back at Eastman House!
Last week we welcomed the 5th cohort of Photographic Preservation and Collections Management graduate students to George Eastman House. This was their first week of classes and we are already exhausted (staff and students). Only another 8 months to go! Today we spent the morning listening to our 16 students report on their summer internships; each student is required to spend 8 weeks in the summer, between year 1 and year 2, working in the field. It was great to hear about their experiences and the list of host institutions is an impressive one; we had students at ICP, the National Gallery of Art, the Getty Research Institute, Chicago History Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and other esteemed institutions. The following pictures are from yesterdays preservation class where the students had a photographic handling lab directed by Archivist, Joe Struble and Assistant Curator, Jamie Allen. I will probably be blogging about the students a lot in the coming months and hope to convince some of them to share their experiences here too.
Joe Struble demonstrates how NOT to handle a photograph.
Students looking at prints after a GEH collections history lecture. This may be the only time you will ever see Alfalfa, Russian Jewess and Afghan Girl sequenced together. The black and white photograph obscured by a student is an Ansel Adams photograph of Yosemite. What a great example of the breadth and diversity of the collections at Eastman House!
