The Clay Center has brought to town a photography exhibit that at once presents famous images while tracing the history of photography from its beginnings to recent times.
“The Best of Photography and Film from the George Eastman House Collection” in Rochester, N.Y., brings 280 photographs and text panels to the second-floor art museum Saturday through Sept. 14. That’s the most ever, according to curators Denise Deegan and Barbara Racker, who have added a few old cameras, including a 108-year-old studio single-lens reflex borrowed from the West Virginia State Museum’s collection.
“There are dozens of iconic photographs,” Racker said. “Many of them are photographs people have seen reproduced in newspapers. They lose something when they’re reproduced. These are the originals. They are completely different. This is the real thing. This is a rare opportunity to see the first photos ever made.”
The exhibit includes two of the most famous images from the Vietnam War: Eddie Adams' 1968 image of a South Vietnam Army general executing a Vietcong prisoner on a street with a bullet to the head and Nick Ut’s 1972 photo of a naked Vietnamese girl running down a dirt road after surviving a Napalm attack.
And it includes these gems:
Timothy O'Sullivan's “A Harvest of Death” image of the Gettysburg battlefield before the dead were buried.
Harold Edgerton’s images of a golf club in multiple stages of being swung, a football being kicked — the shoe dents the football nearly 50 percent on impact — an apple being pierced by a .30-caliber bullet, and a tower-mounted atomic bomb in the earliest moments of a 1950 test explosion.
The first image of the Earth from the vicinity of the moon; and an image of Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon.
Portraits of Babe Ruth and of Albert Einstein.
Depression-era portraits of impoverished people by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.
Glamour shots of movie stars, and short film clips from early movies.
The exhibit starts at the beginning of photography, exploring the competing technologies of Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre’s Daguerreotype — a highly detailed, one-of-a-kind image made directly onto metal — and William Henry Fox Talbot’s paper negative process that allowed for duplicable salt prints on paper.
The earliest image dates from 1843 and the most recent from Sept. 11, 2001, shot in a dust-covered, paper-strewn park adjacent to the collapsed World Trade Center towers.
Born in 1854, George Eastman was a commercial pioneer in photography. He invented the roll of film in 1884 and within a few years a camera to put it in. He founded Eastman Kodak, a hugely successful company that for many years sold film and film processing for a single fee. Customers mailed their film and a check to Kodak for developing, and the company sent back negatives, prints and a new roll of film.
Opened in 1949 in and around the house Eastman lived in, the George Eastman House calls itself the world’s oldest photography museum.
Want to go?
“The Best of Photography and Film from the George Eastman House Collection”
WHEN: Saturday through Sept. 14; closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
WHERE: Clay Center for the Arts & Sciences, Leon Sullivan Way.
ADMISSION: Adults $7, children, teachers, students and seniors $5.50; films, planetarium shows extra.
LEARN MORE: Visit www.theclaycenter.org or call 561-3570.