Well, we finally did it, after twenty years of living in western New York. We visited the George Eastman House. I had been in and out of the work spaces a couple of times, on museum business. But we’d never toured the site itself, until now.
For the day visitor, there are essentially three components: the house itself; the gardens; and the museum. (There are also two theaters, but they weren’t part of our late-morning experience.)
Mr. Eastman built his grand home back at the turn of the twentieth century, when Rochester’s East Avenue was still a dirt street. Eastman by then had amassed a staggering fortune, created a new pastime, and forever altered our experience of history, including personal and family history.
Eastman’s development of roll film put cameras and photography within reach of almost everyone. Suppose that for photography we STILL relied on a handful of professional photographers, painstakingly making a minuscule number of pictures, each requiring extensive chemical preparation and finishing. Wouldn’t our world, and our knowledge of the past, be utterly different?
But Eastman’s innovation (which also led to practical movie film) created an industrial-technical giant that over the years employed hundreds of thousands (including the teen-aged Glenn Curtiss), and financed a spectacular mansion for himself and his mother.
Out at the museum end, where we began, the current special exhibit is The Gender Show — photos exploring and testing the boundaries, definitions, and expectations of gender. We figured it would not really be our cup of tea… and we were right… but we all need to keep learning and experiencing new things, don’t we?
Of far more interest to us was the technology gallery, showing camera development over the years. Here we found the very Graflex with which Joe Rosenthal caught that image of six men raising the flag at Iwo Jima. A four-shot carte de visite camera, a drive-in movie projector, a Vitagraph, space-borne cameras, and home cameras such as the ones we grew up with, all grabbed our attention. But what really seized us was a Fisher-Price toy camera like the one our little boys used for imaginary picture after picture, flash cube spinning the while. One of those guys now has a sideline of professional photography.
The 50-room mansion itself is quite a pile, and clearly comes from the days before income tax. A large pipe organ graces the conservatory; Mr. Eastman hired a musician to play at a set time each morning, while Eastman made his entrance down the grand staircase.
As I passed artwork after artwork I asked myself: these CAN’T be real, can they? Yes and no. Mr. Eastman DID own these world-renowned paintings by old masters, but gifted them to Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery. Those in the mansion now are reproductions.
The 45-minute garden tour, which took us almost all the way around the facility to the tune of cicadas, was impressive even in September. Unsurprisingly, the place was well documented with photography, and our docents used this resource to show us the development of the house, grounds, and gardens.
There are three main gardens — the West Garden, the Rock Garden, and the Terrace Garden. They had all been neglected, or even covered over, since Eastman’s death in 1932. Photography and archeology were used to relocate, recover, and restore them. All are popular sites for weddings. The pool in the Terrace Garden was heated in Eastman’s day, while an underground tunnel from the potting barn let workers bring blooms to the house in the depths of a Rochester winter.
One curiosity we noticed is that our docents several times referred hesitatingly to Mr. Eastman’s “death,” or “when he died.” Mr. Eastman was pushing 80 and had been in debilitating pain for years when he wrote a short note to friends and shot himself in his bedroom. This is widely known — why should there be any shyness about mentioning it? Our photographer son had the same experience with docents there, though he was chaperoning eight year-olds, so it makes more sense in that case. It seemed to us that it would be appropriate to be straightforward about George Eastman’s choice.
At any rate — we’re glad we finally got there. The house, the museum, and the gardens are definitely worth a visit.