George Eastman Museum

Conservatory by George Eastman Museum

Dining Room by George Eastman Museum

This audio tour has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: NEH CARES. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this audio, do not necessarily represent those of the NEH. Transcript For the final film in the trilogy, Edge of Alchemy, I wanted to develop a relationship between two women. I decided to work with the silent-era actresses Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor, both of whom project a sense of interiority and psychological complexity in their portrayals, which is something I’m always looking for. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to present a version of the Frankenstein story but with a gender reversal that would illuminate the classic story in a new way. I’m an avid gardener and I had been thinking about bees and hive decline, and I decided that that crisis could present an entry point for the film and help define the characters. Mary Pickford plays the “scientist” and Janet Gaynor the “creature’ she creates. I took elements from o

This audio tour has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: NEH CARES. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this audio, do not necessarily represent those of the NEH. Transcript The second film in the trilogy is Night Hunter. After I completed Phantom Canyon I knew I wanted to continue working with collages, but I was looking for a way to add psychological complexity to the characterizations. I had admired a performance by Lillian Gish in the D.W. Griffith film Broken Blossoms from 1919. Her portrayal of an abused child is quite staggering and vividly emotional. I thought I might be able to lift her from the scenes in that film and bring her into my own world. I began to cut her out of printed film frames and collage her into a mysterious house with a snake and confounding eggs where she is very much alone. I used fragments of 19th century Pre-Raphaelite illustrations to construct the collages. I ended up incorporating images from 4 of her sile

This audio tour has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: NEH CARES. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this audio, do not necessarily represent those of the NEH. Transcript The first of the trilogy films is called Phantom Canyon. For this film I had the idea of incorporating the subjects from Eadweard Muybridge’s human motion studies from 1883. I was familiar with them from my years studying the figure, they are a resource for many artists since they show multiple images of bodies in motion performing various activities. I thought their stop-motion quality made them a natural fit with animation, and also that the male and female figures could become characters in a film that was a metaphorical examination of a relationship. I combined the figures with images from clip-art books which are collections of copy-right free images often used by artists. The bold contrast in the black and white images seemed to work well with the themes of passi

This audio tour has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: NEH CARES. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this audio, do not necessarily represent those of the NEH. Transcript Star Chart features work from a current ongoing project with the working title Deep Space. I consider the three completed films in Night Reels a trilogy and Deep Space is both similar and moving in a new direction. I try to build on the techniques I employ as I address a new project and in this case I will be adding text to the film in a collaboration with the poet Mary Szybist. What you see here is still silent, however. The landscape for the film is outer space and the film will feature Lillian Gish and Janet Gaynor. I plan to have a subtext involving aging, since Lillian Gish had a long cinematic career and she ages on the silver screen. She made her final film The Whales of August in 1989 when she was 92 years old. The images of her here are from a very early Biogra

This audio tour has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: NEH CARES. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this audio, do not necessarily represent those of the NEH. Transcript My name is Stacey Steers and I am the multi-disciplinary artist behind the work in Night Reels. Over the trajectory of my career the focus of my art practice has been experimental animation. I create my films by hand, like many artisans, in a way that harkens back to the early history of animation. For years I drew my animated films, but around 2000 I began to feel that the expressive quality of my drawing style was too confining and I began to search for a more neutral way to work with images. I decided to try my hand at collage animation, a form I was familiar with through the work of Larry Jordan and others. I decided to try creating collages by combining antique photographic materials or film stills with fragments of 19th century engravings and illustrations. Each c

Landscape Manager Dan Bellavia goes behind the scenes of Dutch Connection, sharing its history and how it comes to life every year.

Landscape Manager Dan Bellavia goes behind the scenes of Dutch Connection, sharing its history and how it comes to life every year.

Hi, my name’s Will Green, and I’m the curator of the exhibition Carl Chiarenza: Journey into the Unknown. I first came across Chiarenza’s work while studying at Rochester Institute of Technology, where a massive, 14-foot wide photograph by him is on permanent display in the lobby of the Frank E. Gannett Building. This photograph was different than any that I’d ever seen before. It didn’t depict a person, a place, or any other subject matter that I could easily recognize. At first glance, it appeared to be little more than a disorganized array of various textures, shapes, and tonal values. Yet as I passed by it each day on my way to class, this photograph began to make more sense. I started to notice the subtle ways Chiarenza repeated certain shapes and textures over the horizontal plane of the picture, and how he deftly balanced light and dark tonal values to construct a composition that was, the more I looked, surprisingly harmonious. In short, as I became more and more familiar with this particular photog

Carl Chiarenza was born in Rochester, New York, on September 5th, 1935. He picked up his first camera around the age of eight, and throughout his adolescence, photography and music were his main passions. Here’s Chiarenza recalling a funny story about his early efforts in photography during an interview with his daughter, Gabriella, in 2019: The playground master—in those days we had a person in the playground—had himself an interest in photography, so he encouraged us young people to play with cameras. And some of us would do that, and I did that, and then went home and eventually made a darkroom in the attic where I processed film and made prints. And when I was developing film one day, I had the tank in the sink in the bathroom on the second floor underneath the attic and I was running water to wash the film—and I got the faucet going in such a way that it would go into the tank, move out of the tank in a way that kept it flowing regularly. And I went across the street to make some more negatives in the p

Carl Chiarenza was a member of the second class to graduate from the newly-established bachelor of fine arts program in photography at Rochester Institute of Technology. His classmates included well-known photographers Bruce Davidson, Kenneth Josephson, Pete Turner, and Jerry Uelsmann. In an interview with LensWork magazine editor Brooks Jensen from 2000, Chiarenza discusses the dual influences of Minor White and Ralph Hattersley, two prominent faculty members at RIT during the mid 1950s: Now in the photo thing, as this program is developing, Hattersley was the person—of the teachers we had Hattersley was the person who was directly involved with putting the program together. Minor came into the program when he moved to Rochester and Eastman House, so he came in part-time. Anyway, as the classes got going over the two-year period, we would be bouncing back and forth between Minor and Ralph. So the wonderful thing about this was that we didn't get stuck with a single track. We were not under Minor White, we w

During his early years, Carl Chiarenza started moving closer and closer to his subjects, resulting in photographs that looked more and more abstract. Here he is discussing that transition with LensWork magazine editor Brooks Jensen in 2000: Well, when I started making serious photographs, after I got through with the photojournalism stuff and got back on some kind of track, I was really trying to work in the tradition of Minor [White] and Edward [Weston] and Ansel [Adams]. And I used to go out daily with Paul Caponigro—we lived together for a while—and we would go out to various parts of New England and photograph. He would always come back with wonderful landscape pictures and I would always come back with mosquito bites… and halfway decent pictures. But, you know, it took a long time for me to understand that that was not where I was going to be able to function, in terms of expressing what I needed to express. Because I didn't know any other way, there was no other way open to me but that tradition I inhe

Carl Chiarenza began working in the studio in 1979. His decision to move his artistic practice indoors was prompted by a chance invitation from the Polaroid Corporation to experiment with their massive 20 x 24-inch studio camera. In a 2008 interview with LensWork magazine editor Brooks Jensen, Chiarenza explains the circumstances behind this important transition: The thing that happened in 1979 which caused me to change from outdoors to indoors—or from using things that existed in the world to making things that had not existed before—was because of Polaroid. When I, along with a half a dozen other people, were invited to test the new 20x24 camera, I was thrilled with the idea, but I had no idea what to do because I’d never brought things to the camera before. I spent a week using up a lot of their film (and therefore a lot of money that wasn’t mine) making pictures which I thought were pretty terrible because I had no idea how to do that. I was trying to do still lifes, but abstract still lifes. And it wasn

In the studio, Carl Chiarenza works intuitively by following his instincts and seeing where they might lead him. Chiarenza discusses his daily routine with LensWork editor Brooks Jensen: I go into the studio and I do everything I can to avoid getting started—that’s part of the ritual, I have no control over it—I’ve just finally figured it out, that’s just what happens: I go in and I do all sorts of stuff—I turn the radio on, I make coffee, decide which music I’m going to listen to, answer the phone, check the email. I mean, it takes an hour for me to get settled in. And then I literally go to my table, which is just covered with stuff and I just at random pick something and start playing with pieces of paper to see if something comes together. More often than not, I keep throwing these things away and throwing things away and starting over and starting over and then I get something that I think is going to begin to work. Then I start by making an exposure, change the lights, change the configurations and ke

Carl Chiarenza is very sensitive to the language that we use when discussing photography. Here he is in 2019 discussing the critical difference between taking and making a photograph: Well, one of the things about the history of photography is the words that have been used since the beginning, and since the beginning there has been this notion of “taking” something, “capturing” something, or “shooting” something! And none of those words seem to make any sense to me, and that’s partly because some people before me asked these questions. Like Ansel Adams, for example, said, “I don’t take a picture, I make a picture.” And I couldn’t agree more. I don’t take, I make. Source: Gabriella Chiarenza Interview (December 20, 2019)

Throughout his career as both a photographer and as a professor of Art History, Carl Chiarenza has argued that pictures come from other pictures. By this he means that we are influenced by all of the pictures we’ve seen before and—whether consciously or unconsciously—we use them as models when we create pictures of our own. Chiarenza elaborates on this idea in a 2008 interview with LensWork editor Brooks Jensen: The whole idea of pictures coming from pictures—is in my career both as a photographer and historian—has always been central to my thinking about picture-making, and photography in particular. And more my work more particularly. In the past when I taught for some 30 years, I would start every class—no matter what the period or theme was, whether it was Renaissance art or medieval art, twentieth century art or photography—the first class would always involve cave pictures and we would have this discuss that we don’t know where those pictures came from. There are a lot of theories about it, but obvious

The landscape remained one of Carl Chiarenza’s main interests even after he entered the studio in 1979 and took his work indoors. In an interview with his daughter, Gabeilla, Chiarenza explains his evolving idea of landscape. I always liked being outdoors in the landscape pictorially-speaking, because I liked looking at landscape and the things that nature put together and made interesting to look at, but I never liked being outdoors, physically, because even as a child I had trouble with heat and sunstroke. So while I was working with collages in the studio, I guess I started trying to make my own landscapes. So some of the collages I made were in fact inspired by landscape ideas or visions that I imagined, that could be made with paper and especially torn paper, to give a sense of a landscape moving across the surface. So a lot of the work that I was doing in those days—and still—have a reflection of my interest in landscape, which I couldn’t do physically. Source: Gabriella Chiarenza Interview (December

In a recent interview with his daughter Gabriella, Chiarenza had this to say about his series The Peace Warriors of Two Thousand and Three: Well, the most obvious set of work I did that was directly impacted by what was going on in the world was during the war in Iraq , and I was very upset about what was going on there—I always had trouble with wars—so I started a series of pictures which ended up being called, “The Peace Warriors of 2003.” They were still abstractions made out of collages, but with some reference to military people and equipment and stuff, and fortunately, Nazraeli Press thought that was an interesting idea and decided to publish a portfolio book of that material. And that’s one of the very few times where I made references from abstraction to reality—“reality.” But I was so upset with that war that that motivated me to make those pictures. Source: Gabriella Chiarenza Interview (December 20, 2019)

There is no correct or incorrect way to experience a photograph by Carl Chiarenza. He has long insisted that viewing his images is a personal and open-ended experience. Here’s Chiarenza in an interview from 2019 explaining what it is he hopes you, the viewer, might gain from looking carefully at his work: I only hope that the viewer can find her or his own something in what I make, and I have said this over and over again, that the pictures are made to be responded to in any way that is personal to the person looking at it and responding to it. I’m not trying to persuade people to do anything. I don’t photograph as many of the great photographers like my schoolmate Bruce Davidson—I don’t do that kind of thing—not because I don’t like doing that kind of thing, but because I’m not very good at it, and he is. So, what I’m doing is responding to things the way composers respond to sound, and hoping that there are people out there who will be affected by it in some way that affects them personally and has nothing