We have two big  exhibitions  going up this week, which means adrenaline is flowing and the creative services team is working long hours.  

Nature as Artifice

The first of the two  exhibitions,  Nature as  Artifice, originated in the Netherlands and was curated by Maartje van den Heuvel. Nature as Artifice  looks at the dichotomy between the perception, inspired by  the tradition of Dutch landscape painting,  of an idyllic agrarian Dutch landscape and the reality of the planned, manipulated landscape for which the Netherlands is known today.  The show features work by many well known  contemporary  Dutch artists including Hans Aarsman, Wout Berger, Cary Markerink and Theo Baart, Edwin Zwakman, Marnix Goossens, Frank van der Salm and others.  The photographs in this  exhibition  are spectacular–there really is something to be said about Dutch light.  

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As custodians of the collections at George Eastman House part of our mandate is to make sure the material in our care is preserved for future generations.  This tenet has been drilled into my brain since my education began, but regardless of my status as museum worker, it has never been easy for me to throw away or destroy a photograph.

Recently I was doing some housekeeping in the  Department  of Photographs and came across a box of  8 x 10 copy prints made at GEH back before digital. The prints were nice gelatin silver copies of authentic Ansel Adams photographs held in the collection, and were probably made for a curator to aid in planning an  exhibition or publication.  What do we do with them?

They are not collection material and and we would not want them to show up outside the museum and be mistaken for original Ansel Adams photographs. So after some hesitation, and perhaps a little soul searching, I decided to shred them. And it was kind of fun.

I’ve been showing a lot of photographs of our gardens because they are so glorious right now, but I thought a change of pace might be fun.  

So this is what’s been happening underneath the House and Gardens.  These pics show our new chiller and HVAC system that work to keep our archives at the right  temperature  and humidity—important for the preservation of the valuable photographs and films in the GEH collections.

This thing keeps our vaults at just the right temperature

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