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.

We’re getting ready for the big event! Here’s the scene from our front lawn today…

Education, like art, should be about knocking us off our feet and challenging us to understand. And for this reason museums must present ideas one can’t get a handle on.

George Eastman House invites one to consider art outside the comfort zone, by experiencing an exhibition of photographs by the contemporary, and often controversial, artist Roger Ballen. The 74 black-and-white images of his mini-retrospective, titled Roger Ballen: Photographs 1982-2009, are on display through June 6. Ballen himself will join us for a lecture at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 15.

South African artist Ballen is known for his thought-provoking photography and his particular attention to rich detail, photographing his human and animal subjects in complex, fictional scenes filled with symbolism.

Tommy, Samson, and a Mask, 2000, by Roger Ballen

Ballen’s work is fascinating, compelling, mysterious. It encourages viewers to step outside of their understanding of reality in a photograph, challenging them to assess things differently.

Critics have called Ballen’s images powerful social statements that at the same time are disturbing psychological studies.  Aperture Magazine described his work as “images from a waking dream; compelling and surrealistic with sparkles of dark humor,” and Australia’s Artlink Magazine said they are “freeze-frame images stolen from the sub-conscious … Ballen’s bizarre tableaux are an illustration of the real world.”

Visitors to Eastman House have recorded both positive and negative remarks in a comment book inside the gallery. One visitor wrote, “Dark, repressive. I see the thoughts in these images, but wonder how and why this art?” Another described the exhibition as “an awake nightmare.” Some have replied with single words, such as “Freakish,” “Creepy,” “Scary,” and “What?” Positive notes include, “Dark but inventive and edgy,” “Touching and inspiring,” and “Thanks for bringing challenging work to Rochester.”

Puppies in Fishtanks, 2000, by Roger Ballen

If one only visits exhibitions of work he or she already knows, or already loves, he or she gets caught up in old, safe ideas, being trotted out yet again. The role of art may well be to describe the process of engagement, an ever vigilant search for what is not understood.

For instance, if one goes to the theater to see Samuel Beckett, whom Roger Ballen marks as one of the people he pays attention to, that theatergoer might come out and not have the slightest understanding of what her or she just saw.

Ballen’s unique artistic vocabulary, which he composes using a square format, creates visual ambiguities as universal metaphors of the human condition. Our relationship with a photograph can be structured in a lot of different ways. Like anyone off on a trail of understanding, Ballen found the camera a way to mediate, to look more strongly, more intently, to segregate an aspect he wanted to examine or look at, and made a picture of it.

In that vein, German filmmaker Werner Herzog said, “Images are almost impossible. Artists had to dig for them within this damaged landscape, and did so simply because we urgently need images to accord with the state of civilization and our own innermost souls.”

Ballen’s photographs of people and places have a wonderfully rich, magical, if not spiritual, engagement of mystery. His subjects are people who may not be your favorite folks to sit down and have dinner with, but perhaps this is an occasion to engage that challenge and that conversation.

At the Ballen exhibition, a visitor will find things here he or she is not used to looking at, whether it be people or ways in which photographs are created. With the right attitude, this art can be very fruitful for all of us, and the promise of the process rewarding.

View the complete talk ROGER BALLEN: PHOTOGRAPHS 1982-2009 [Parts 1-5] on our YouTube Channel.

Last fall, we blogged about planting the bulbs to get them ready for February (Tulips and Hyacinths and Daffodils, Oh My!, Oct. 19, 2009). Now in just over a week, spring comes early to the Eastman House when over 2,000 tulips, hyacinths, daffodils, freesias, and amaryllis will be on display for the annual Dutch Connection exhibit. It’s a welcome escape from the Rochester snow each year (especially now that Punxsutawney Phil has predicted 6 MORE weeks of winter).

For those of you in the deep freeze like us in Western NY, we invite you to enjoy this moment of spring color:

a glimpse at last year's display

The 2010 arrangement is based on George Eastman’s own selection from 100 years ago.  He ordered the bulbs from a Dutch company a year early in 1909 and grew them to maturity in his greenhouses.  Once they were organized, he would invite his friends and family to his home to enjoy the colorful display. 

The bulbs will be here February 12-28. A small exhibit will also be presented on the second floor of the house showing Mr. Eastman’s activities throughout 2010.

For  more info,visit http://www.eastmanhouse.org/Main/exhibitions/detail.php?title=dutch-connection-2010

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.