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.

Eastman House has probably done more Lewis Hine exhibitions than anyone else. And yet no one, including Eastman House, had ever done a comprehensive monographical exhibition and publication that looked at the man’s whole career. As a cultural historian, what interested me was the way Hine worked, and how his work related to the social history of his time. He’s clearly a product of the progressive movement at a time when progressive politics and philanthropy were being transitioned into something more like what we now know as sociology and social work. And so the idea of philanthropy and helping the underprivileged moved from a kind of lady bountiful, benevolent philanthropy to a much more systematic study of the problem.

And then, at the end of his life, he was suddenly discovered by people like Beaumont Newhall, and that shift in the meaning of those photographs and the way we understand those photographs is, to me, really core to the way we understand all photographs. They’re slippery things, and their meaning changes with their use.

All of that was something that we could get at with this exhibition. Lewis Hine’s work has been reduced in the popular mind to maybe five or six images that are really famous. But when you do that, you take them so completely out of context that they end up being kind of sentimentalized. And I think that would have been the last thing that Hine would have wanted. So an exhibition of this size, drawing on the remarkable archive that we have here  —  I mean, we have everything — let us return him to the context of his time and to try to bring a richer understanding to the pictures as a whole.

 Group of Italians at Ellis Island, ca. 1905 

Living Quarters of Workers Family in Old Time N.Y. Tenament, 1910

Newsboy Asleep on Steps, ca. 1912

Expert Linotyper in a Southern Publishing House, 1920

Laying Beams, Empire State Building
Construction, ca.1931

The show came out of a conversation with Carlos Gollonet, Agnes Sire, and Frits Giertsberg. Carlos was from the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid. They had been producing really important photographic shows at a great rate. They don’t have a significant photographic collection themselves, so they have been partnering with major institutions all over the world. They worked with Carnavalet, they’ve worked with the Musée d’Orsay. They approached us, asking, “What kind of a major monographical show might you be able to do for us?” And the Lewis Hine archive at Eastman House is one of the reasons I came here. I’ve wanted to do a Lewis Hine show, a serious, comprehensive, big Lewis Hine show, since before coming to Rochester.

I’ve actually known each of the curators involved for probably 10–15 years. And of course, Eastman House has always been part of a network. “International” is not a throwaway word in our name — it’s really who we are.

With the support of the National Museum of Photography of The Netherlands, the Mapfre Foundation, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, and the Terra Foundation, which specifically supports American art going to Europe, we were able to do something we couldn’t have done alone. These partnerships are totally win-win. They’re really a personal pleasure as well.

LINKS

Fundación Mapfre Lewis Hine exhibition page en español

Fundación Mapfre video: ‘Lewis Hine: la fotografía como documento social (Sesión I)’  en español

La Lettre de la Photographie article ‘Madrid: Retrospective Lewis Hine’

New York Times article ‘Lewis Hine: Photographer, Activist, Character’

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.

As George Eastman House celebrates “Oscars® week” – culminating with the annual party this Sunday eve – we also celebrate our motion-picture collections and shine a spotlight on the ones that relate to this year’s nominees.

We have two close ties to the film Hugo, as its Oscar®-nominated director, Martin Scorsese, preserves his personal film collection of several thousand titles at Eastman House. And alongside those films are those of Georges Méliès (1861-1938), the filmmaker at the center of the Hugo storyline.

Eastman House holds one of the largest Méliès collections in the world, with 60 different Méliès titles across 129 elements, including production stills created under Méliès’ direction. The films includes Voyage dans la lune, the title that plays such an important role in Hugo, as well as preservations of titles, such as La Danse du feu (The Dance of Fire), Les Fromages automobiles (The Skipping Cheeses), Tom Tight et Dum-Dum, and Voyage à travers l’impossible (An Impossible Voyage).

Scene from ‘Voyage dans la lune’

And, further, the Eastman House’s senior curator of motion pictures, Dr. Paolo Cherchi Usai, is an expert on the work of Méliès, producing a book and exhibition on his work in the 1990s.

In the book A Trip to the Movies (George Eastman House, 1991), Cherchi Usai noted Méliès has a reputation among film specialists as an “author” in the strongest sense of the word, as well as the “creator of the motion picture performance,” according to Louis Lumière’s definition.

Georges Méliès was a professional magician trained in classic 18^th-century theater. He first saw the new “moving pictures” in 1895, as presented by the Lumière Brothers. Soon after Méliès was filming and projecting his own creations, using stop-motion photography to incorporate visual effects and using techniques such as the fade-in, the fade-out plus the dissolve to create the first real narrative films. For this he has been regarded “the father of special effects.”

It is believed Méliès made more than 500 films and, when he put film production behind him, reportedly destroyed many of the originals. Yet, his films were monumental stepping stones for future filmmakers, such as D.W. Griffith, who said of Méliès, “I owe him everything.”

“Méliès constitutes an unprecedented case in film historiography with relevance going far beyond the chronological boundaries of the so called ‘silent period,” Cherchi Usai wrote. “Méliès indeed discovered a new vehicle for aesthetic expression, long before cinema realized it, but he was also the standard-bearer for an individualistic conception of filmmaking.”

A rediscovery of Méliès’ “lost” films was cause for celebration in recent decades.
The Pordenone Silent Film Festival, of which Cherchi Usai was a founder, presented in 1989 the world premiere of the restored Méliès film Le Chevalier Mystère (1899), which had been found in the vaults of George Eastman House.

“The screening was met with a standing ovation and newspaper reports used words such as ‘genius,’ ‘tiny jewel,’ and ‘one-minute masterpiece’ to describe 80-feet of film that had been saved under mediocre conditions and, given the state of the nitrate print, reprinted in the best manner allowed by current technology,” wrote Cherchi Usai.

Scene from ‘Le Chevalier Mystère’ 

Within a few years of the invention of film, Méliès “was coping with its possibilities and limitations, evidencing an attitude that will later become typical of artists like Cecil B. DeMille, Orson Welles, and Stanley Kubrick: striving for absolute control of the moving image, for demiurgic power over the photographic reproduction of the visible world,” Cherchi Usai said. “Even today, it is hard to understand how Méliès, with the relatively fundamental technical resources at his disposal, could produce narrative mechanisms and optical illusions of such complexity: six or seven multiple exposures on a single strip of film; characters that multiply themselves and then ‘talk’ to their double with perfectly timed labial movements, pauses, changes of backdrops, and substitutions of objects.

“… The mind perceives the spectacle as an explosion of fireworks, with stories, digressions, and implied references, instead of sparkles. Instinctively, these images, previously labeled ‘primitive,’ become ‘up-to-date.’ Having been painstakingly saved by film archivists and slowly absorbed into the logic of the cultural ‘condition,’ early cinema has now become an indicator of modernity.”

George Eastman House, “Rochester’s Home,” is also home to the legacy of George Eastman and the arts he made possible. As such, it attracts many of Hollywood’s finest filmmakers, including Oscar nominees Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor.

Payne has been nominated for three more Academy Awards this year, for producing, directing and writing THE DESCENDANTS (2010). Jim Taylor, his frequent collaborator, was also nominated this year for his work co-producing the film. This is their fifth feature film but the first time they have not shared a writing credit.

Payne and Taylor were invited by Assistant Curator Jim Healy to introduce a screening of their second film, ELECTION (1999) in July 2006, and participated in a Q&A after the film. Payne returned in December of that year to host a screening of one of his many favorite films, Richard Fleischer’s THE GIRL IN THE RED VELVET SWING (1955). [Fleischer himself was a guest of GEH ]. Once he arrived a good relationship was established between our archive and the filmmaker. During both visits, Payne spent a few days at GEH, mostly watching many private screenings of films from our archive in the Dryden Theatre. He’s a real cinephile – but not the kind who slavishly repackages his influences in his own movies. They’re best classified not as comedies or dramas but as Alexander Payne films.

(l to r) Jim Talylor, Jim Healy and Alexander Payne

Healy, in his introduction to ELECTION, called Payne and Taylor “contemporary descendants to great filmmakers like Frank Tashlin, Michael Ritchie, Hal Ashby and the pioneers of film satire – Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges.” Healy called their films “exquisitely written and profoundly funny.” He praised their “great taste in cinema and their expansive knowledge of film history and a deep understanding of essential film grammar – the cinematic language laid out by their predecessors.”

Of the four films that he has written and directed, when asked why he chose to screen ELECTION for the Rochester audience Payne said that it tends to be the “favorite of film nerds. And it is Cinemascope. And can I brag and say that both Barack Obama and Richard Holbrooke have told me that it’s their favorite political movie?”

The following are some of the highlights from both of Alexander Payne’s visits to George Eastman House.

Payne: “Casting is Job 1. The old cliché that 90% of directing is casting is really true. Even though I spend a lot of time complaining about working with the studio, [we] deal with who the top two or three actors are then after that it’s completely mine.”

“I shot [ELECTION] soon after CASINO (1995) had come out. It kind of quietly had an influence on the style of the film. It’s one of the few American films that I’ve seen with multiple voiceovers. [It is] moving and cutting quickly to constantly changing music cues which [Scorsese] began in GOODFELLAS (1990). I think CASINO is kind of a masterpiece.”

In response to a question about how they met, Jim Taylor said “[In 1989] Alexander had a room that was for rent. He had a two bedroom apartment. We were just acquaintances but I moved into that room and we became friends and started writing together.”

Payne, Taylor and Healy on the Dryden Theatre stage.

George Eastman House: “Your first film was in ’96. How many scripts did you guys work on together before you hit on one that got made?”

Payne: “Actually in ’91 we wrote and I directed two shorts for the Playboy Channel called INSIDE OUT – an anthology series. The producer Alan Poul, who later produced SIX FEET UNDER, did that show. He tried to get who at the time he thought were cutting edge and non-DGA directors.”

Audience member: “Has SIDEWAYS brought you a lot of freedom? Do you have a narrow window of opportunity? How secure do you feel?”

Jim Taylor: “We’re doing really well. But we don’t want to feel to secure. That could be a problem.”

Payne: “But I think filmmakers should act as though they have complete freedom. Especially when we’re writing, we’re pretending we have a billion dollar budget. Let restrictions come later.”

Payne on classic Hollywood cinema: “The more I learn as a film director, the more I learn about technique, the more I see the huge achievement of the classical Hollywood film style. No matter how they are made or under what conditions, a director is always thinking about how to make the actors move and where to put the camera. Whether you’re Godard or Michael Curtiz, it’s the same problem. Where do I put my actors and how do I move my camera. I see the elegance and practicality and efficiency and economy with which classical Hollywood film directors worked. And it’s astonishing. Young film school kids in love with the French New Wave, or now they talk about Korean cinema or something like that, they might [minimize] the film that they’ve seen the most, like CASABLANCA (1942). I say go try to make a CASABLANCA. Making something like that is going to be harder than trying to emulate any of these other films.”

Because it is my blog I can close with my favorite part of the evening. Jim reminded the audience that “we should remember the Stanley Kubrick quote that ‘the only person in the world who has final cut is the projectionist’. So kudos to Ben Tucker up there in the booth.”

Payne: “Thank you, Ben.”

Those moments make it fun to work at George Eastman House.

We wish Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor the best of luck on Oscar night.

Payne with audience members after the screening.