Here at George Eastman House we are planning a farewell gala for Dr. Anthony Bannon, the Ron and Donna Fielding Director, for May 12 titled “An Evening in Technicolor.” He leaves Eastman House after 16 years at the helm. Over the next five days we will share highlights of the Museum’s amazing successes during his tenure.

At the top of the list are advancements in higher education, with one-year certificate programs and master’s degrees in film and photographic preservation, plus a decade-long fellowship program in photograph conservation.

1) The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation

Dr. Paolo Cherchi Usai, Senior Curator of Motion Pictures:

I recall Tony hammering out details with me, Jeffrey Selznick, and Trustee Ted Curtis in 1996 about starting the school, which was to be the first of its kind in the world. We soon will celebrate the graduation of the 16th class. The program offers a master’s degree in conjunction with the University of Rochester, and archives around the world are staffed by Selznick School graduates, allowing for a connected network that benefits film preservation globally.

"Gone With the Wind" screen tests, restored via a Selznick School project.

2) Photographic Preservation and Collections Management

Dr. Alison Nordström, Senior Curator of Photographs, Director of Exhibitions, and USA Director of the George Eastman House/Ryerson University MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management:

Eastman House has been training the next generation in the photographic field since 1947 and now more than ever there is a need for formal, high-level educational programs. To educate future leaders in the field, we established in 2003 a Master of Arts degree in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management with Toronto’s Ryerson University. This program, now also available as a one-year certificate program, is a comprehensive combination of practical and classroom experience, offering students access to renowned collections and faculty, as well as our library of photographica and conservation lab. Graduates of this program are working in archives and museums across the globe.

Conservator Taina Meller, left, with students of the Photographic Preservation and Collections Management master's degree program.

3) Photograph Conservation

Taina Meller, Head of the Kay R. Whitmore Conservation Center:

George Eastman House has been a major influence in photograph conservation education and research under Dr. Bannon’s leadership. From 1999 to 2009, the Advanced Residency Program, generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and offered in conjunction with RIT’s Image Permanence Institute, provided an extraordinary educational opportunity for almost 40 conservators from all over the world. Today, many of the historic processes previously taught as part of this fellowship program are taught in workshops throughout the year at Eastman House and at the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock , England. In recent years George Eastman House conservators have been called upon to conduct most challenging conservation treatments on iconic photographs. These include 1848 Daguerreotype Panorama of Cincinnati Waterfront, a significant collection of the first ever photographs of Manila, Philippines, and a glass interpositive of Abraham Lincoln’s famous Hesler portrait of 1860, Lincoln’s favorite –  which arrived at the museum as shards of glass. An unprecedented series of grant awards supporting conservation have been hallmark achievements during Dr. Bannon’s tenure. These range from the NEA’s Save America’s Treasures grant to the inaugural award by the National Science Foundation, which we received collaboratively with the University of Rochester.

Tomorrow: We look at motion picture acquisitions, our library, and digitization of the collections

The Scott Expedition to the South Pole ended 100 years ago today, but still can be experienced through photo and film.

The George Eastman House Photography Collection has a small, but intriguing set of documentation from the ill-fated attempt by the Englishman Robert Falcon Scott and his team of four to reach the South Pole a century ago. The Scott Expedition resulted in the collection of numerous scientific specimens and more than 1,000 photographs and reels of film documenting the journey. But it all ended when Scott lost his life during the expedition 100 years ago today, March 29, 1912.

Joe Struble is a native Rochesterian and has lived here all his life with the exception of 4 years spent in Richmond, Virginia where he received a Master’s Degree in Social Work. He has been employed in the Photo Collection at George Eastman House as Assistant Archivist from 1989-2005 and as Archivist beginning in March 2005. One of his greatest satisfactions is in discovery and in adding to the knowledge of material in the Photo Collection.

Well, I guess I forgot how easy it was to make a tintype; no cutting or cleaning glass and no pictures peeling off the plate. This was all about pouring the collodion and making a unique image in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee.

We started on Monday at George Eastman House with an illustrated presentation on the chemistry and history of the wet collodion negative and positive processes. Then we went down to the technology archive where curator Todd Gustavson presented a display of original tintype cameras, silver baths and other rare equipment.

Curator of Technology Todd Gustavson (far left) with group. 

After lunch we went to Scully & Osterman Studio where they met my wife, France. I gave a demonstration of making a tintype that included tinting and burnishing the picture. The group then practiced the techniques of pouring collodion onto tintype plates and applying the developer.

Pouring Collodion on the Plate.

On Tuesday we all met at Scully & Osterman and after a morning recap on theory the group I gave a demonstration of mixing iron developer and France demonstrated mixing iodized collodion. The group spent the rest of the morning shooting 4 ¼” x 5 ½” plates. After a lunch break they continued to make 5” x 7” tintypes into the afternoon. The students varnished their own plates themselves before shooting the next image. At the end of the day I discussed the basics of identifying antique lens types, explained how a wet plate conversion back works and demonstrated a simple traveling darkroom made from cardboard.

Wednesday we shot all morning. After a great lunch we continued shooting into the afternoon. For the last day in the studio we shot 6½” x 8½” whole plates. Some of the students actually used an original four lens tintype camera that exposes four images simultaneously on the same plate. Late in the afternoon we went back to the Museum and viewed some really beautiful examples of vintage Melainotypes, ferrotypes and tintypes.

Oh, the term tintype evolved to be the name for all collodion images made on thin sheets of metal; none of which were made of tin. Cheap things in the nineteenth century were often made of tinned iron that was coated with a shiny black finish applied to the surface to prevent rusting. Since Melainotypes and ferrotypes were the cheapest images you could buy and made on black finished sheets of iron…the term tintype seemed to fit nicely. By the way, we didn’t use tin either, we made our tintypes on aluminum.

Our next collodion workshops are Ambrotype Making here in Rochester in May and the Ambrotype and Tintype Workshop at Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock England in July.

Check out more images on our Facebook album for this Workshop.

Guest Blog by film critic Jack Garner

Silent film legend Buster Keaton was long known as “Old Stone Face” because he never cracked a smile, even while houses collapsed around him and tornadoes blew through town. However, at least one thing was known to put a smile on his face: his George Eastman Award from Eastman House. Author Marion Meade noted in his biography, Cut to the Chase, the great comedian considered his Eastman award more prestigious than an Oscar®.

Keaton was part of the astonishing first group of winners of the aptly nicknamed “George” award, on Nov. 9, 1955. He joined an all-star roster that included Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Ronald Colman, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, and Lillian Gish. Though not all came to Rochester for the honors, many did, including Keaton, Pickford, Swanson, and Gish. They attracted a sellout crowd at the 3,000-seat Eastman Theatre.

Lillian Gish speaks from the Festival of Film Artists stage at the Eastman Theatre in 1955.

In the more than a half-century since, Rochester and George Eastman House have been host to a sparkling array of Eastman Award winners, from Fred Astaire and Jimmy Stewart to Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, and Meryl Streep. The award ceremony is held every few years, the centerpiece of a night of black-tie celebrating and important community fundraising at the Eastman House and its Dryden Theatre.

The event adds prestige to the Eastman House film archive, generates awareness and enthusiasm for the collection and the Museum’s motion picture preservation activities among important Hollywood figures, and is a great excuse for a grand party.

And sometimes, the honorees return the favor with important gifts to the museum. Director Martin Scorsese, the 1994 honoree, now stores some 8,000 titles from his world-class film collection at Eastman House, where they are often scheduled for screenings and will eventually be a permanent part of the Eastman House collection. And the 1997 honoree, actress Isabella Rossellini, has made Eastman House a repository for films by her famous father, Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini.

The awards began in 1955 as an idea by the Museum’s first director, Gen. Oscar Solbert. Founding film archivist James Card recalls in his memoirs that with the proliferation of film festivals in 1955 — and the growing popularity of the Academy Awards® — he should have foreseen that the “PR-conscious director” would conceive of a ceremony of his own. Card wrote that he was called into Solbert’s office: “ ‘We will award Georges,’ he announced. I firmly believed he was confident that in a manner of time, the Oscars® would be superceded by Georges.”

Certainly, that hasn’t happened. Yet the awards, which are held in high regard among those who’ve been honored, and probably a few who wish they would be honored.

First called the Festival of Film Artists Awards in both 1955 and 1957, the name was changed to the George Eastman Award “for distinguished contribution to the art of film” soon after but has had the nickname ‘The Georges” on and off since.

“The George Eastman Award was the first token of recognition established by a US cultural institution to pay tribute to the artistic achievements of the leading artists of the film industry,” says Patrick Loughney, a former Motion Picture Department curator at Eastman House, and now at the Library of Congress. “In terms of longevity and the prestige of past recipients, only Oscar® stands in comparison.”

Part of the initial attraction of the Georges was that the 1955 and 1957 honors were awarded to stars, directors, and cinematographers from 1915 through 1930, and were selected through extensive balloting, organized by Card, through mailings to any and all significant surviving participants of that important period of film history.

After the initial flurry of the 1955 and 1957 honors, the complex and difficult balloting process was put aside, and the museum directors, archivists, and boards began the process of selecting the stars, which were usually just one per ceremony, and usually about once every two or three years. The new process began in 1965 with Fred Astaire, and continued in the ’70s with Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller, Blanche Sweet, and director George Cukor (who, before becoming Katharine Hepburn’s favorite Hollywood director, honed his craft in the ’20s at Rochester’s Lyceum Theatre).

This reporter’s observance of the Georges began in 1978, when the incredibly likeable Jimmy Stewart was honored. As part of the ceremony, the Dryden Theatre hosted a screening of the then-rare and out-of-circulation Vertigo, which drew film aficionados from around the world.

1978 Eastman Award honoree James Stewart poses playfully on the site of the Schuyler C. Townson Terrace Garden while touring the Museum grounds.

The Eastman House also revisited the concept of honoring several stars at a large Eastman Theatre celebration in 1982, when several exceptional women were honored simultaneously: Joan Bennett, Dolores Del Rio, Myrna Loy, Maureen O’Sullivan, Luise Rainer, and Sylvia Sidney.

The seventh of these legendary women was Louise Brooks, the silent screen siren who spent her last decades living in Rochester, and who had spent many hours studying films at Eastman House for her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood. The ill, apartment-bound recluse didn’t make it to the ceremony, but she sent word that she was thrilled with the honor  — which came only three years before her death.

The Eastman House has continued to be remarkably successful in attracting prestigious names to receive Georges and to be the all-important magnets for the fundraising ceremony. Fortunately, the awards establish their own natural sort of celebrity networking. Martin Scorsese, for example, led Eastman House to his friend and former wife, Isabella Rossellini, which led to another award (and to important treasures for the archive).

Meryl Streep in the Dryden Theatre with her 1999 Eastman Award.

As Meryl Streep said when she was honored in 1999, “I can see I’m in very august company.” And, since she’s an Oscar® champion and arguably the greatest actress of her generation, she and the newest recipient to be named, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award winner Richard Gere, make the company even more august when future Eastman award recipients are determined.

The only time things didn’t work out as planned was in 1994 when Scorsese was honored and had to withdraw from attending at the last minute because of complications on the set of his movie, Casino. In his stead he sent Griffin Dunne, who’d starred in Scorsese’s After Hours.

On one of the grandest nights of Eastman Award history, on Oct. 24, 1987, recipient Gregory Peck was surprised by the appearance of one of his favorite co-stars, Audrey Hepburn. “I’m honored to bring to this ceremony the film industry’s admiration for your talent, their respect for your integrity, and the love they feel for you.”

Peck was delighted. But he also said he was happy because the Eastman House honors also put a spotlight on the Museum’s important role as a leading center of film preservation.

“For a long time, Hollywood didn’t realize the importance of preserving its films,” he told the audience here. “These old films are an invaluable source of information for film students. And, for the general public, they’re a window into the past.”

Audrey Hepburn shows her Eastman Award to a sold-out Dryden crowd in 1992, after its presentation by then-chairman of the Museum’s board of trustees Bruce Bates.

Five years after Peck’s ceremony, Hepburn would herself be honored with an Eastman Award. Though her adoring fans didn’t know it at the time, they witnessed history. Those close to Hepburn knew she was quite ill, though she put on a brave and stunningly gorgeous face. Ultimately, it was a bittersweet occasion, the last major public appearance by the Hollywood icon, who died four months later.

Jack Garner was staff film critic of Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle for 28 years and for 20 of those years was the nationally syndicated chief film critic of Gannett News Service. A fixture in Rochester journalism since 1970, he was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Attica prison rebellion in 1971. Today he is a member of Eastman House’s Motion Picture Acquisitions Committee and the Eastman House Council, and in 2007 was honored with the George Eastman Medal of Honor for his contribution to motion pictures and the community.

Sure, the times are changing and technology moves foreword. Yes, it’s sad that films days are numbered, but quit your whining. There’s another revolution in photography and it’s coming from Rochester, the “image city.”  I’m referring to the counter culture of historic photographic processes and they’re hot. Photographers all over the world are making their own plates and papers— and they’re doing it here at Eastman House.

Azo print made with the gelatin emulsion process being taught in April

Tintype being fixed

Coating paper in the gelatin emulsion darkroom 

 Scully & Osterman Skylight Studio, where we’ll shoot tintypes in March

The revival in the daguerreotype process started at George Eastman House back in the 1970s. Hey, we also jump-started the current craze in collodion photography by teaching the very first wet plate workshops in the mid-1990s. In the last two years we introduced dry collodion plates, collodion chloride printing-out paper and even did workshops in the earliest processes of Niepce, Daguerre and Talbot… the heliograph, physautotype and photogenic drawing! In private tutorials here at the museum we’ve taught albumen on glass and even orotones!

In March we have a great three day Tintype Workshop where we’ll make plates under the skylight over at Scully & Osterman Studio and see amazing original images and even collodion era cameras and equipment from the archives at the museum.

Gelatin silver emulsions are soon going to be the next historic photographic process revival and now is the time to gather information before the culture is gone. This April ex-Kodak emulsion engineer Ron Mowrey and I will teach our third gelatin emulsion workshop!

This is the real stuff for all you people who have been so upset about the demise of emulsion. We’ll be making a simple printing paper emulsion, but it’s the first step to the more advanced film emulsions; so one step at a time. If we get enough interest we’ll give a film and plate emulsion workshop next year, but the prerequisite would be the basic workshop. So, the way to keep film alive…is to make it your self!

Read more about all our 2012 Photography Workshops, or contact me directly at mosterman@geh.org to arrange a private tutorial, custom group workshop or if you need some advice with a process that’s giving you trouble.