Welcome to Photomuse, a Resource for Scholarship in the History of Photography.
Thursday, 7 August 2008, 5:40 pm.

Humanistic wartime images from Spain, Egypt, Italy, Israel, and Greece by the renowned Magnum photojournalist Chim (David Seymour) in the years immediately before and after World War II showcase his empathetic approach to conflict situations.

David Seymour
Polish (1911-1956)
Tereska, a Polish child in a home for disturbed children. When asked to draw a picture of her home, she produced these scrawls, 1949
Gelatin silver print
31.8 x 25.5 cm (12 1/2 x 10 in.)
George Eastman House Collection, Museum Purchase

With her black bob haircut, Louise Brooks is an enduring icon of the silent film era, symbolizing the sexual frankness and social liberation that characterized the 1920s. This exhibition of film stills and photographs drawn largely from the Louise Brooks Collection at the George Eastman House looks at Brooks as one of the powerful "New Women" of Weimar German cinema.

Unidentified Photographer
[Louise Brooks and Michael von Newlinsky]
Film still from G. W. Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl, 1929
Modern gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in.
George Eastman House Motion Picture Department, Louise Brooks Collection

A revelatory exhibition of views of Paris taken in the early twentieth century by Eugène Atget (1857-1927) with contemporary interpretations of similar scenes by the photographer Christopher Rauschenberg (b. 1951).

Eugène Atget
French (1857-1927)
Boulevard de Strasbourg
1912
Albumen print
22.5 x 17.8 cm. (trimmed)
George Eastman House purchase: ex-collection Man Ray

More than 150 daguerreotypes by nineteenth-century Boston's famed masters of the art, Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes.

Southworth & Hawes
American, active ca. 1845–61
[Reverend Rollin Heber Neale], ca. 1850
Whole plate daguerreotype
George Eastman House, Gift of Alden Scott Boyer

This exhibition examines the complex relationship of photography and personal memory. Turned into hybrid objects through their elaboration with human hair, wax flowers, and other additions, these photographs offer a far more involving memorial experience than photography alone can provide.

Maker unknown (American)
Portrait of man in uniform, c.1915
Gelatin silver photograph, string, butterfly wings, flowers & leaves on paper, wood frame with glass
40.0 x 29.6 cm
Private Collection: promised gift to Eastman House

This exhibition sheds new light on E.J. Bellocq, the legendary photographer of prostitutes in Storyville, the red-light district of early twentieth-century New Orleans.

Ernest J. Bellocq
American (1873-1949)
Untitled [Woman in body stocking], ca. 1912
Gold-toned printing-out paper print, 8 x 9 7/8 in. (20.3 x 25.1cm)
Printed by Lee Friedlander, after 1970
George Eastman House Collection

This is an exhibition that reflects those decades in the nineteenth century when photography in China was mainly the province of Westerners visiting or working in that country.

John Thomson
Scottish (1837-1921)
Tartar, Canton, ca. 1869
Albumen print
10 11/16 x 8 1/6 in. (27.1 x 20.5 cm)
George Eastman House Collection

This exhibition presents a selection of photographs and films that show the Bauhaus master's engagement in social issues and formal experimentation.

László Moholy-Nagy
American (b. Hungary, 1895–1946)
Mass Psychosis (Massenpsychose), 1927
Collage of photomechanical and drawn (ink and pencil) elements
25 x 19 1/4 in. (64.2 x 49.2 cm.)
George Eastman House Purchase; ex-collection Sybil Moholy-Nagy

This exhibition highlights rare illustrated editions of books by such authors as Sir Walter Scott, Alfred Tennyson, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and H.G. Wells. In them, the images of Julia Margaret Cameron, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and others demonstrate photography's evocative power.

William Henry Fox Talbot
English (1800-1877)
A Scene in a Library
From: The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1844
Salted paper print
5 x 7 in. (13.0 x 17.8 cm)
George Eastman House purchase: ex-collection of Alden Scott Boyer

The Photo League, which was active from 1936 to 1951, sought to establish a proletarian photography in America. Through social documentary surveys, such as "Harlem Document" (1938-40), the League's Feature Group emphasized working-class subjects in urban contexts.

Aaron Siskind
American (1903-1991)
Harlem Lady in Kitchen, 1940
Gelatin silver print
10 7/16 x 7 13/16 in. (26.5 x 19.8 cm)
Collection of the International Center of Photography, gift of Emanuel M. Brotman

Sixty original, circular-format Kodak snapshots from the 1880s and 1890s provide surprising glimpses of American families in both domestic settings and on world travels.

Frederick Church
American (1864-1925)
Arc de Triomphe, Paris, 1890
Albumen silver print (Kodak snapshot)
George Eastman House Collection

This exhibition presents selections from an early landmark of documentary photography: the stunning visual record of the construction of the Paris Opera carried out by the firm Delmaet & Durandelle between 1864 and 1869.

Delmaet & Durandelle
French (active 1862-1890)
Opera Facade, 1870
Albumen print
28.3 x 38.4 cm.
George Eastman House Collection, gift of Eastman Kodak Company: ex-collection Gabriel Cromer

This exhibition looks at the social impact of the daguerreotype, the first practical form of photography. Included in the exhibition are some of the first experimental photographic plates made in the United States, as well as the first camera of Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre, the inventor of photography. Also included are masterworks by such daguerreotypists as Southworth and Hawes, Robert Cornelius, Mathew Brady, and others.

Robert Cornelius
American (1809-1893)
Prof. Hans Martin Boye, May 1840
Daguerreotype
8.1 x 6.6 cm., 1/6 plate
George Eastman House Collection, gift of 3M Company, ex-collection Louis Walton Sipley