The George Eastman Museum presents Selections from the Collection, the newest display of items from the museum's photography vaults on view in the Collection Gallery.

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To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Eastman Museum coming in 2024, this exhibition highlights some of the finest of the museum’s holdings. The objects chosen for the exhibition demonstrate connections among photography, history, and culture. They chart a course through photo history, identifying notable movements and trends while giving context to a breadth of photographic practices, technologies, communities, and traditions.
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In this exhibition, direct comparisons are made between early photographic print processes, such as the daguerreotypes produced by Southworth & Hawes in the United States, and the salted paper prints of Hill & Adamson in Scotland. These objects showcase the resources and technologies that were present at the time of their making, as well as the competing interests that propelled their development in the 19th century. Other pairings in this exhibition examine the development of photographic styles and aesthetics, each a response to specific cultural or artistic trends that emerged throughout the 20th century: pictorialism, Group f/64, photojournalism and reportage, abstraction and experimentation, and the influence of postmodern practices in contemporary art.
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The response to these photographic trends has been varied and complex, and not without critical discourse and debate. As the medium has evolved, access to photographic tools and technologies has increased, expanding the understanding of photography and its wider cultural implications. Grown to encompass a multitude of voices and diverse perspectives, photography continues to bring forth new challenges and provocative assessments of that which came before.

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This selection includes works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, László Moholy-Nagy, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Robert Frank, Imogen Cunningham, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, and many others. Certain items in Selections from the Collection will be rotated over the course of the next year, allowing for repeat visitors continue to have fresh experiences. The exhibition complements the upcoming 75 Years of Photography at Eastman: Evolving Histories, an Evolving Collection exhibition, opening in the main galleries in the fall of 2024.

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About the Collection Gallery

The George Eastman Museum photography collection is among the best and most comprehensive in the world. With holdings that include objects ranging in date from the announcement of the medium’s invention in 1839 to the present day, the collection represents the full history of photography. Works by renowned masters of the medium exist side-by-side with vernacular and scientific photographs. The collection also includes all applications of the medium, from artistic pursuit to commercial enterprise and from amateur pastime to documentary record, as well as all types of photographic processes, from daguerreotypes to digital prints. The museum's Collection Gallery is dedicated to rotating installations that demonstrate photography’s historical trajectory through photographs and cameras drawn from the collection. The selection of photographs changes regularly, and each rotation offers new opportunities to engage with the museum's treasures.

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About the George Eastman Museum

Founded in 1947, the George Eastman Museum is the world’s oldest photography museum and one of the largest film archives in the United States, located on the historic Rochester estate of entrepreneur and philanthropist George Eastman, the pioneer of popular photography. Its holdings comprise more than 400,000 photographs, 28,000 motion picture films, the world’s preeminent collection of photographic and cinematographic technology, one of the leading libraries of books related to photography and cinema, and extensive holdings of documents and other objects related to George Eastman. As a research and teaching institution, the Eastman Museum has an active publishing program and, its L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation’s graduate program (a collaboration with the University of Rochester) makes critical contributions to film preservation. For more information, visit eastman.org and follow the George Eastman Museum account on Facebook, as well as the @eastmanmuseum accounts on Instagram, TikTok, and Threads.

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The Collection Gallery is sponsored in part by ESL Federal Credit Union.

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https://www.eastman.org

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