Jessica Johnston's Posts

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.

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!

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!

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.  

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!