There were two prominent types of landscape photographs in the 1860s: Civil War battlefields strewn with the dead, and sweeping vistas of the West.
George Eastman House
Conservators Reverse-Engineer the First Noncommercial 35mm Film Strip
Using salvaged machines and a hand-cranked camera, conservators at the George Eastman Museum created the first strip of 35mm motion-picture film not produced by a commercial company.
The First Photographs of Lightning Crackle with Electric Chaos
In the 1880s, William Nicholson Jennings set out to prove the diversity and unpredictability of lightning’s path, capturing the electric light with his plate camera.
Telling the History of Photographic Processes, from Daguerreotypes to Digital
The George Eastman House released a 12-part video series last month that starts with the silhouette and traces photography’s development through daguerreotypes, cyanotypes, Kodachrome, and right up to digital.
Orson Welles: Lost and Found
The only surviving copy of Orson Welles’ 1930 silent film Too Much Johnson was long thought totally lost after a fire devastated Welles’ home outside Madrid in 1970, yet yesterday the George Eastman House not only announced it had been recovered, but that a screening would be held this October.
The Return of Organ Music in the World’s Oldest Photography Museum
Each morning and evening, as he ate, George Eastman would be serenaded by live pipe organ music played by a musician who came daily to the the photography innovator’s home in Rochester, New York. Sometime after his death when the house became a museum, this system of thousands of pipes was irreparably damaged by a fire. Now the North Organ Project at the George Eastman House is returning the massive organ to its blaring glory.
First Photography Museum Joins Google Art Project
By now, we’re used to museums partnering with the Google Art Project and sharing selections of their popular or less known collections online. However, this month a photography museum finally got into the mix, with the George Eastman House, the oldest photography museum in the world, offering an initial 50 images from its extensive collections online.