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The Best of Photo & Film - the world-renowned treasures of Eastman House on view!Rare artifacts on display for limited time; exhibition opened Sept. 13

Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film is showcasing the world-renowned treasures of its photography, motion picture, and technology collections via the exhibition The Best of Photo & Film: Right Before Your Eyes. More than 200 unique and historically significant artifacts, presented together for the first time, will create this rare experience on view Sept. 13, 2003 through April 11, 2004.

"The motion picture collection spotlights clips from some of its most prestigious restorations including Pan (1924),The Lost World (1925), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and The King of Kings (1927), as well one of its newest Napoli che canta (1926). The film score for Metropolis (1926), and scripts for The Ten Commandments (1923) and Call Her Savage (1932) can also be viewed together with treasures from the Technology collection including a 3-strip Technicolor camera (ca. 1933) and Rosher's 35mm camera that bears the signature of silent film star Pickford (1908)."

The photography display features feature iconic photographs such as Mathew Brady's portrait of Abraham Lincoln; the first photograph of lightning; celebrity portraits by Nickolas Muray and Arnold Newman; Alfred Stieglitz's The Steerage; and Capa's D-Day, Omaha Beach. The exhibition also will showcase variations of famous photographs, such as Wickes Hine's Power House Mechanic alongside the other "runners up" who posed for Hine in the same set-up but were not the final choice; Steichen's famous portrait of Robeson, in which the subject appears stern, alongside an image from the same shoot where Robeson is laughing; and two photographs of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, as evidence that edits were made by the photographer to her most celebrated image.

Several cameras are featured, alongside significant photographs, including the first commercially sold camera, a Daguerreotype outfit (1840); the first Kodak camera (1888); Ansel 's first camera, a Brownie (ca. 1901), and his Kodak Vest Pocket (ca. 1916); Alfred Stieglitz's Eastman View No. 2D Camera (1922); Joe Rosenthal's Anniversary Speed Graphic that captured the famous photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima (1944); and a NASA Lunar Orbiter (1966).

Visitors have the opportunity to become part of the picture themselves, posing as a rigger high above New York City, in front of a backdrop of an enlarged photograph that documents the rise of the Empire State Building, or on a movie set in the furry clutches of King Kong himself.

The Best of Photo & Film is made possible by M & T Bank and Preferred Care. For more information about the exhibition or Eastman House, please call .

The Best of Photo & Film: Right Before Your Eyes is on view through April 11, 2004.

Eastman House showcases its library collection with exhibition Poetic Images

The library at Eastman House is the most comprehensive library of photography and motion picture materials in the world. And many of these artifacts are on public display in Poetic Images: Literary Illustrations from the and Ronay Menschel Library, Eastman House, on view now through Jan. 4, 2004. The exhibition features photographic illustrations of literary works and portraits of major authors from the 1840s through 1910.

Poetic Images showcases more than 60 works from the n and ian eras, featuring masters such as Henry Fox Talbot, Francis Frith, Margaret Cameron, and Alvin Langdon Coburn. The exhibition explores the ways that photographs gradually became assimilated to the printed page — permitting photography to become a true mass medium capable of reaching a vast public.

“Works of literature have long intrigued and engaged visual artists,” explains Stuhlman, Librarian and Curator of Rare Books for Eastman House, and curator of the exhibition. “Since its beginnings, photography has taken up the challenge, producing during the second half of the nineteenth century a great heyday for photographically illustrated books. These works show how diverse photographers responded to imaginative writing and the prestige of the celebrated author.”

The images on view are supplemented by passages of text, sometimes by the photographers themselves and sometimes drawn from the literary sources. The book as an object is stressed with handsome binding and page layouts augmenting the photographic images, thus providing a compelling overview of the convergence of photography and book arts, as revealed in some of the most historically significant works that exist.

Poetic Images is presented in collaboration with the International Center of Photography in New York, which opened the show in June, to critical acclaim and appreciation. The New York Sun said, “Poetic Images reminds us of a time when the knowledge of what things beyond one’s experiences looked like was very limited, and when photography miraculously presented everyone a vast new world.”

From the advent of photography, the production of multiple prints from a master negative lent itself to publication. The exhibition begins with Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of photography on paper, who chose to disseminate his invention by means of illustrated books. A plate from his first work The Pencil of Nature, titled “A Scene in a Library,” sets the stage. Talbot interrupted production of this series to produce a second book, Sun Pictures of Scotland, which he hoped would capitalize on the craze for Sir Walter with views connected to the author. The cult of also produced such veritable relics of copies of The Lady of the Lake (1871) bound with wooden covers from trees “warranted to have grown in the pleasure gardens of Sir Walter at Abbotsford.”

Alfred Lord Tennyson was another celebrated figure whose work spawned many illustrated editions. A friend and neighbor of Margaret Cameron on the Isle of Wight, Tennyson posed for her camera in fancy dress, christening the portrait “The Dirty Monk.” This portrait was translated into photogravure by the next generation, with considerable handwork intensifying the image of the poet as mad visionary. This was in stark contrast to the genteel image of the Poet Laureate by the firm of Lock and Whitfield that appears in Men of Mark, a gallery of n notables.

In illustrating a text, some photographers approached their subject by recording the setting of the story, while others enacted scenes in staged tableaux. Two highpoints of narrative illustration are seen in Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man by the little-known Cincinnati photographer J. Landy and in the work by Mrs. Gray, who illustrated the nursery rhymes of Mother Goose.

The exhibition concludes with the work of Alvin Langdon Coburn, whose talents were recognized and endorsed by Bernard Shaw, himself an amateur photographer. Coburn’s ethereal platinum prints accompany ’s The Cloud, and in his collaboration with H.G. Wells, Coburn the Pictorialist constructed images of a surprising modernism.

The books and journals exhibited cover a wide range of subject matter, and include examples of virtually every photographic process applied to paper including calotypes, salt prints, albumen prints, platinum prints, gelatin silver prints, and cyanotypes. In addition there are numerous works illustrated with all the major photomechanical processes: photogravure, carbon printing, heliogravure, collotypes, photo-lithography, Woodburytype, and halftone processes.

The and Ronay Menschel Library at Eastman House is devoted to the literature of photography and motion pictures. The collection of more than 53,000 volumes is international in scope, and covers all aspects of photography and cinema from their pre-history to the present. One of the library’s specialties is books illustrated with originated prints; this growing collection currently exceeds 650 titles.

Poetic Images is presented in collaboration with the International Center of Photography in New York, and is the fifth in the series “New Histories in Photography.” It is made possible by the generous support of The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Anne and Tony Fisher, and Gayle and Greenhill. Entry to the exhibition is included with museum admission. For more information, please call .

Poetic Images is on view now through Jan. 4, 2004

Sweet Creations: Gingerbread House Display

Eastman House invites young and old to enjoy a feast for the eyes and nose — a display of more than 60 cleverly designed and decorated gingerbread houses. The Eastman House’s ninth annual exhibition Sweet Creations: Gingerbread House Display will be on view Wednesday, Nov. 12 through Sunday, Dec. 14.

This will be the largest display to date. The delightful gingerbread creations are produced by professional bakers, hobbyists, Scout troops, families, schools, and community groups. They will be on display throughout the historic 1905 home of Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak Co. The Eastman House itself will be decorated for the season in turn-of-the-20th-century holiday style.

Most of the gingerbread houses will be sold via silent auction, with proceeds benefiting future restoration projects at Eastman House. The Sweet Creations display is organized by the Eastman House Council, under the direction of chairwoman Carol Mullin of Brighton. The exhibition is sponsored by Tops Friendly Markets.

Sweet Creations is included with museum admission. Admission is $8 for adults; $6 for senior citizens (60 and older); $5 students; $3 for children 5-12; and free for children 4 and under. For more information, please call .

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When you visit...Take a look at the newly refurbished Discovery Room on the second floor of the Eastman mansion --- a place where kids and parents can have a hands-on experience of photographic and motion picture history and technology. Regularly scheduled volunteer presentations will lead you through the activities.

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