Archivist Joe Struble practices his new Fire Fighting skills.

A cloud of white “smoke” could be seen rising from the parking lot at George Eastman House, however this was not smoke. Don Ezard, Head of Security, had been saving up old fire extinguishers so that staff could practice using a fire extinguisher, providing a hands-on experience with this safety tool and demystifying the device. About ten staff members were on hand for Don’s demonstration of the devices, and then each took turns emptying one from the pile. The smallest extinguishers only provided a few seconds of blast, and would be great for small fires, but some of the larger cans would have allowed for extended use.

So what did I take away?

1. The most important part of fire safety is making sure that people are safe. If the fire is too big, leave it to the professionals.
2. To Use a Fire Extinguisher
   1. Operate the Extinguisher from a safe distance.
   2. Pull the Pin: It is actually really easy to pull out, even if it has a plastic safety ring wrapped around it.
   3. Aim at the base of the fire, not at the flames!
   4. Squeeze the lever/handle slowly.
   5. Sweep from side to side while still aiming at the base of the fire.
3. Know where your fire extinguishers are located: you don’t want to be searching for one when the fire starts.
4. Fire extinguishers have a shelf life: Some of the oldest ones no longer worked or the hoses leaked when they were used.
5. The chemicals in the fire extinguisher can make a big mess and leave a residue behind, so thanks to those who cleaned up ours yesterday!

 For more photos click here.

Still from the film "Women Men Marry"

Just reading some of the titles, without knowing the story lines, can send your imagination to the heights of sublime comedy or into the depths of heartbreaking melodrama:

• A Designing Husband’ (1921)
• ‘A Modern Marriage’ (1950)
• ‘Discontented Husbands’ (1924)
• ‘Don’t Change Your Husband’ (1919)
• ‘Her Husband’s Trademark’ (1922)
• ‘Lend Me Your Husband’ (1924)
• ‘Lying Wives’ (1925)
• ‘A Marriage For Convenience’ (1919)
• ‘My Unmarried Wife’ (1918)
• ‘Old Wives For New’ (1918)
• ‘Spite Marriage’ (1929)
• ‘The Fatal Marriage’ (1922)
• ‘The Part-Time Wife’ (1925)
• ‘Wanted: A Husband’ (1906)
• ‘Watch Your Husband’ (1920)
• ‘When Strangers Marry’ (1922)
• ‘When The Wife’s Away’ (1926)
• ‘Whose Husband Are You?’ (1922)
• ‘Why Change Your Wife?’(1920)
• ‘Wife Wanted’ (1946)
• ‘Women Men Marry’ (1922) 

Let’s take a closer look at the last title, WOMEN MEN MARRY.  In the American Film Index I found a brief synopsis of the film story:  At the encouragement of her aunt, young Emerie is seeking to marry a rich, titled Englishman.

On board an ocean liner she meets and falls for a young man, Dick Clark (no, not that Dick Clark).

When the death of Emerie’s father reveals that she is adopted and left penniless, she is devastated.  However, Emerie finds happiness by meeting her natural parents and discovering Dick still cares for her.  The happy ending concludes when a second will is brought in, giving Emerie the bulk of her adopted father’s estate. 

Donated to the museum in 1992 from the American Film Institute and the Netherlands Film Museum, this nitrate print is now being considered for a preservation project in the future.

Notice that none of the above titles mention the word ‘love.’  That would fill another list.

Snelweg: Highways in the Netherlands                                 by Cary Markerink & Theo Baart

The Netherlands is a small country with a population of 16 million people. It would easily fit four times into New York State. Space is scarce. Since the 1970s the country has been transformed into a big suburbia, interconnected by a grid of highways and railroad-tracks. We were looking for a metaphor for this transformation of the Dutch landscape (and in a broader perspective Dutch culture) and we decided the highway could showcase the changed country in it’s frantic rush towards economic progress.

Kunsthal, Rotterdam 1996

Since the Dutch prefer to look at ‘high culture’ rather then reflect upon the ‘low culture’ – the suburban landscape – it was difficult to find funding for our project. It forced us to take the lead. We subsequently became the producers, photographers, publishers and designers of the project. For the publication we had in mind we invited the American-born Dutch writer Tracy Metz who contributed an elaborate essay on the phenomena of the Dutch Highway. When designing the photo-book we choose a linear form. We had photographed in a mix of styles – using a variety of cameras and film – reflecting on the changes that had occurred in landscape-photography since the seventies. Every spread of the book was different; we used gatefolds, grids, full-bleed pages and included a typographical landscape as a double-gatefold, using the names of underpasses which in the Netherlands are called after the historical locations present before the highway was constructed there.

Maly Manezh, Moscow 1998

We presented Highways in the Netherlands for the first time in 1996 in The Kunsthal in Rotterdam. Again we used a linear concept and designed an installation on a 25 meter long wall: a floating composition based on a line of large photographs which we connected by placing smaller prints above and below them using a mix of frames. On the opposite wall we placed the typographical landscape of names, which then reflected in the glass frames of the photographs. At the opening of the exhibition we organized a symposium where 400 invited people attended: leading architects, city-planners, policymakers and journalists. We gave away 400 copies of our book. The project generated a lot of publicity at the time, but mainly because of the themes we addressed. The discussion about the vernacular landscape was stimulated.

Neue Pinakothek, München 2008

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo 2008

It took years before the photographic form of our project was appreciated but since 1996 Snelweg was presented in Moscow, at the Naarden Foto-fest, in Otterlo, in Munich and now in Rochester. Every time we put together a slightly different installation as our ideas about the presentation evolve.

George Eastman House, Rochester 2009

But we stay loyal to J.B. Jackon’s observation (from his 1994 book ‘A sense of place, a sense of time), which we had used as the motto of our project: “Roads no longer merely lead to places; they are places”.

After I settled into work I was reminded of OTHER Delphiniums at George Eastman House. Edward Steichen, famous for curating the landmark exhibition Family of Man, as well as for making his own photography, was a passionate Delphinium enthusiast. How nice that we have such a lovely display of Delphiniums blooming in the garden, and their ancestors (maybe), immortalized by Edward Steichen, living in boxes in the photo archive. Steichen won many prizes for his cross-breeding of Delphiniums and at one time planted 5 acres of his Connecticut home with the flowers. Here  are a couple of his photographs of these magnificent blue flowers.

It was at this meeting that it was decided email would be the way people gave us their photographs. It seemed like a reasonable way to do it. And it is, if the number of submissions is, say, 40, or even 100. But when you get 1,000 or more submissions, suddenly the notion of downloading 1,000 picture-laden emails, reformatting every one to conform to a common format, printing it out, and attaching it to the wall becomes daunting.

And daunting it was. As you can see below, the unsung heroes of creative services (with help from the Department of Photographs) spent tireless hours formatting, printing, cutting, and hanging.

For the upcoming exhibition Picturing Rochester, things need to be different. We will not have the luxury of time when it comes to hanging the fall shows, so the entire process needs to be efficient. And for all its success, the submission process for Why Look at Animals? was not efficient.

The answer? Build a community submission tool.

Instead of email, submitters fill out a simple form that sends us the picture. From there, the picture and information go into a database, from where we can review the submissions and make any necessary adjustments.

This interface also allows printing in high resolution, right in our staff’s web browsers. No more single email account where everything goes, and no more reformatting by hand! The result?

It’s still not 100% done, but its a good start, and a good deal faster than doing everything by hand!

Installation Shots of Why Look at Animals? by Barbara Galasso, Museum Photographer
Photograph of the PicturingRochester test installation by Todd Gustavson, Curator of Technology

Our first stop was the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland. The film department, managed by Selznick alumna Criss Kovac, is charged with preserving and making accessible the motion pictures created by the Executive Branch of the US Government. This encompasses far more than the duck-and-cover curios of the 1950s—everything from the IRS instructional films and US Information Agency propaganda shorts to documentary classics of the New Deal and all manner of military footage. Miles of it. The US Military is, by far, the most prolific “studio” of the Executive Branch. (In fact, NARA’s film archive is the only one I know of where one sometimes needs high-level security clearances for the rather prosaic task of sprocket repair.)

Criss led a tour of the motion picture section and related departments. (One commonality with Eastman House: stick all the film people in the basement.) A recent Congressional appropriation has allowed all the audio-visual offices at NARA to pursue major equipment upgrades, everything from state-of-the-art telecines (about which more later) to robotic microfilm scanners that look like something out of a mad scientist’s dental lair. All the collections are in the midst of a digitization project which will make it easier and quicker for researchers to view materials on site—or at home. (A partnership with amazon.com has already made practically the whole of NARA’s Universal Newsreels collection available on-demand via DVD-R.) Of course, all the film material is still being conserved in climate-controlled vaults. The most storied and valuable film in NARA’s collection, the Zapruder footage, is kept in a special safe that is intimidating to say the least. Needless to say, we didn’t get a chance to handle that one, although Criss did arrange a screening of Curious Alice, a recent preservation effort that brings a dubious, absolutely insane anti-drug (or anti-anti-drug?), Carroll-inspired classroom film to glorious, retina-burning life.

We also broke into smaller groups to explore some of NARA’s film printing and processing equipment. Although NARA recently acquired a modern and quite fancy BHP printer, the department maintains a variety of older models; coincidentally enough, old, shrunken film is more capably handled by decades-old machines with appreciable wear-and-tear than it is by newer, high-speed printers geared toward churning out hundreds of release prints on short notice. NARA’s Bell and Howell Model J contact printer, for example, is about 60 years old and has been run by Marvin Glover for about 35 of those years. The Model J, a wholly mechanical workhorse from an age when standards were quite different, has great tolerance for damaged and shrunken material, and is consequently the only option for some of NARA’s more neglected film elements. (NARA also has a run-down Biograph printer from 1916 that they’ve long wanted to repair, with seemingly unfathomable rough-and-tumble rewards.)

Lest I give the impression that NARA’s interests are solely antiquarian, let me also discuss some other modern equipment. Criss demonstrated the quite impressive Sondor, which creates an optical soundtrack negative from a vintage magnetic track in one pass. (A production standard for decades, now-obsolete magnetic tracks are all that exist, sound-wise, for many government productions. These days very few theaters can play these in magnetic sound. The Dryden can, of course.) Even cooler was the Spirit telecine, a sophisticated film-to-video transfer unit that can scan at up to 4K resolution. (That’s twice the resolution of HDTV. Experts disagree about how much native resolution a frame of 35mm film holds, but 4K is generally deemed adequate for most purposes.) This extraordinarily gentle machine, which barely relies on perforations to guide the film through the scanning path, is capable of handling material (such as the short-lived cellophane-base newsreels intended for amateur projection in the 1930s) that would be ripped apart by even the Model J printer. Hardly an enemy of photochemical restoration methods or restorations, digital technology like the Spirit allows for high-quality scans of difficult material (including extremely faded color prints) that can manipulated, restored, and then be recorded back onto film. The final result combines the flexibility accorded by digital techniques and the physical presence and permanence of film.

Our visit to the Museum of Modern Art’s Celeste Bartos Conservation Center in Hamlin, Pennsylvania was not quite as intensive. How could it be when our Poconos hotel was so remote that it didn’t even have a street address? (The Comfort Inn staff recommended that we use GPS to find the place and further recommended that we try dinner at the adjacent Twin Rocks Restaurant, a trucker joint with on-site showers, a bevy of stuffed animals in the gift shop, and the infamous Fruits of the Forest pie. The Twin Peaks fans in our class were quite taken with this diner, I should add.)

MoMA’s vaults are laid-back, compared to NASA (or NARA), at least. Bears and moose are known to walk by the windows now and again. Every room (and I mean every room, including janitorial closets and kitchenettes and elevator cars and every last film vault) is named after a Biograph short, a constant reminder of the institution’s archival patrimony. (The Museum has conserved the Biograph materials since a massive donation in 1940, the young department’s first substantial acquisition.) Conservation Center Manager Artie Wehrhahn gave us a tour and a detailed history of the 14-year-old building that was, to say the least, edifying as a lesson in the real-world compromises and trade-offs inevitable in such an undertaking. Artie was instrumental in the design of the MoMA nitrate vaults, which were subsequently copied by GEH, the Library of Congress, and UCLA.

Visiting MoMA is a complex experience for aspiring film archivists. As the first serious film archive (and cinémathèque and curated rental service) in America, their legacy preceeds them. Every can of film in the vault is cataloged and they have coped admirably with a constant influx of acquisitions and, what’s more, an ever-changing vanguard of video and multimedia art acquisitions. Film Collections Manager Katie Trainor, another Selznick School alumna, was also on hand and explained the intricacies of MoMA’s preservation workflow, funding sources, access plans, and the like. The recent appointment of Rajendra “Raj” Roy as Chief Curator of Film promises to take MoMA in a new direction. But don’t worry—they’re currently working on new restorations of two of D. W. Griffith’s most important post-Biograph features, Orphans of the Storm and The Birth of a Nation.

There are very few intertitles in this film, none of which list actor, director, or even character names.  Carefully inspecting the film on the bench we can follow along with the ‘action,’ but our synopsis of the plot is rough.  Without any proper filmographic information, this will be difficult, but is it not hopeless.  We start by taking digital photographs of the key actors to share with other archives and archivists. 

Using website such as LOST FILMS  or the NITRATE FILM INTEREST GROUP on FLICKR we can reach out to the community by posting what little information we have to others, and with a group effort we can help bring those once unknown films back to the land of rediscovery.  Who knows, the archivist may discover a long lost film that audiences and film fans have been waiting for! 

Please take a look at these websites to help George Eastman House and other archives around the world identify films!

That being said, I come to you today with two distractions to share.

The first, some meta-photography relating to Jessica’s post on megalethoscopes, taken by our photographer, Barbara Galasso.

Box o' megalethoscope slides ready to go.

megalethoscope slides laid out for digitization

The Big Moment

Ensuring accurate color

The second distraction is your very own portable megalethoscope projector (online!).

It’s way unrefined, really a quick and dirty test of what may be a more robust project later.. but in the meantime, enjoy it, and if you can’t figure out how to get it to work, drop me a line.

Every year George Eastman House welcomes hundreds of researchers interested in our collections; we host photo historians, curators, students, scientists, and hobbiests from all over the world. Often they are experts in the field and we get to learn a thing or two about our collection. A few weeks ago a former professor of mine was here to look at our collection of Megalethoscope slides.  Antonella Pelizzari teaches History of Photography at Hunter College in NYC and is an old friend of Eastman House. She is currently working on a book on Photography and Italy and traveled to Rochester to research and look at our collection of Megalethoscope slides. I was familiar with these delightful objects before Antonella’s visit, but I didn’t realize that we have one of the largest collections of Megalethoscopes in the world. I also learned a bit about how they work and how they are constructed, which I will share here.

Megalethoscope slides are meant to be viewed with a Megalethoscope. This large apparatus, invented in 1870 by Carlo Ponti, allows the viewer to look at an image in two ways. First, a daylight scene can be viewed by opening the doors and letting a series of mirrors direct the light onto the front of the slide. The second view is achieved by closing the doors to the scope and directing light through the back of the slide, producing a magically transformed scene. Take a look at the series of images below that show one slide with different types of illumination: reflected, reflected + transmitted, and just transmitted.

This marvelous effect is achieved by painting the back of an albumen photograph, which is then adhered to a curved wooden frame.  The photograph is also pierced through in places to create the illusion of lights in the scene. Several pieces of tissue paper, also selectively painted, are spaced and layered behind the photograph and finally a piece of canvas is stretched behind the layers and attached to the back of the slide frame. This creates a sealed package about 1 inch thick. The canvas and tissue diffuse the light before it passes through the slide to the viewer, helping to create these delightful colorized scenes.

We are going to put the entire collection up on the Flickr Commons as soon as they are shot.

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.  

Several of the artists and the curator will participate in a panel discussion and opening party on Friday, June 12, 2009.  The exhibition is on view at Eastman House from June 13 through August 16.  After its run here the show will travel to the Aperture Gallery in New York City. 

Nature as Artifice

The second show in the midst of installation is a rehanging of the seminal 1975 George Eastman House exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.  The recreation of New Topographics was organized by the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona and George Eastman House. This landmark exhibition will travel to seven venues in the United States and Europe.

Lewis Baltz photographs ready to hang

Unidentified photographer, Deer Lamp, ca. 1965, photo-offset lithograph, Gift of Geoffrey Batchen

Our exclamations were mixed with glee and horror as we looked at the three photographic scenes depicted on the shade and the legs that support it. The lamp added some fun to our Friday afternoon and it wins my vote for strangest photographic object in the collection. The lamp was featured in the 2005 exhibition Forget me Not: Photography and Remembrance curated by Professor Geoffrey Batchen.

One of the greatest films made about life in Hollywood is the 1937 masterpiece A Star Is Born. The nitrate print in the Eastman House Collection was on the top of my list of ‘films to inspect’ this week at the Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center. 
Showcasing the talents of Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, director William Wellman tells the story of a small town girl who makes it big in the glamorous world of Hollywood.  Basing many scenes on real-life incidents of film stars such as Norma Shearer and John Barrymore, Wellman gives an insider look at what is means to be famous.

To help illustrate the story he included many Hollywood landmarks of the time. Watching this film will make you feel like a time-traveler/tourist as it includes shots of the Club Trocadero; the Hollywood Legion Stadium; the swimming pool at the Ambassador Hotel; the Santa Anita racetrack and the Hollywood Bowl.  One particularly noteworthy scene was filmed in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, using crowds gathered for the preview of the United Artists’ release of Rembrandt. 

The museum’s nitrate print shows it has been projected many times since it was struck in 1937.  The torn sprockets, splices and excessive shrinkage makes for a delicate inspection on the work bench. 

Using a light hand, I spooled through the material to check for decomposition, odor, and discoloration.  Each of the 11 reels was checked, frame by frame for any foreign materials that may cause future damage to the physical object.  This includes but is not limited to: paper, plastic, non-standard adhesives and other acid-loving objects. 

What I like about this film is the bright color and its ‘modern’ setting.  It provides a glimpse into Hollywood production in the early 1930s but its message still rings true today.  This nitrate print, donated in 1958, still deserves its place in our vaults, for its potential value in future preservation, and for its wonderful peek into old Hollywood.

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.