It is difficult to talk about this project. It began as an exercise in frustration but developed into something else, probably.
The reason I live in Rochester is because I visited the Eastman House, nearly by accident when I was in college in Ohio, and was awestruck by what I saw. Since then I moved to Rochester for graduate school, got a job at the museum, working in the darkroom, had a show there, and am in the museum collection. Later I taught photography, then opened my own studio, and I continue to visit the museum. I am still awestruck on occasion. I was involved in the effort to keep the Eastman photographic collections in Rochester when the trustees threatened to give them to the Smithsonian Institution. Solutions were found, a new director hired, planning committees formed, and expectations raised. I was expecting a lot—too much perhaps—and was disappointed in the exhibitions and publications and the lack of possibilities for local photographers.
I began to photograph the house through the windshield of my car, as most people see it, at different times of day and in different seasons. I made a couple of prints and liked the way they felt. I secretly hoped that someone would rush out and demand that I stop. Perhaps I would get arrested and go to jail for photographing in a restricted zone—but that never happened.
I am an architectural photographer and know how to record buildings in their best light. But I had never gone beyond the ideal, the perfect, to record the fleeting, the blurry, and the nearly too dark. Certainly I had avoided snow storms. I had a lot of extra negatives and began to play with them. I dropped a negative and ground it into the floor, and I stuck on some tape, and made a print, and it was – exciting. I gave one negative to my son and asked him to step on it and he rotated his foot and punched a hole in the negative—a completely different technique—and that print was even better. I scorched a negative over a candle, and ground a thumb print into it—the ultimate signature for a photographer—and the possibilities seemed to open up even more. I put one negative through an ink-jet printer to see what would happen and “my rant about the house” became visible.
But the prints were still pristine. I was too conservative, too reverential, and too cautious to tear off the edges rather than carefully trim them or tear a print apart and bleach and tone the sections differently and then put them back together again. Once I gave myself permission to try those things, yet another range of possibilities opened up and it got to be even more fun. I was making prints that I could not duplicate—one-of-a-kind prints that were more beautiful than my previous carefully controlled editions.
When I described the project to a writer friend at the Highland Park Diner as, “Photographing the Eastman House over and over again, stalking maybe,” she said it sounded “evil”, and I liked that. Now, 18 months later, I appreciate that the project has provided a degree of freedom that is good for me. I am thinking of this show as a tribute to the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 50 years old, and still seeking to find its way, like me, perhaps.
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