Items tagged with 'photography'

Conservator Shingo Ishikawa and Audiovisual Conservation Assistant Kerry Yates recently attended a series of workshops run by Sylvie Penichon, from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.

Last Friday I left Canberra for New York to participate in the NFSA/George Eastman House (GEH) Exchange Program.

As well as George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, I’ll visit the International Centre for Photography and the Metropolitan Museum of Art , then the Library of Congress Audio-Visual Conservation Centre in Culpeper, Virginia.

After over 24 hours of travel in four different aircraft I finally arrived in Rochester, NY, on a rainy Friday night. I was met by the smiling faces of Jeff and Deb Stoiber from George Eastman House. Over the weekend I was taken on a tour of Buffalo, NY, by Jeff, Deb and past NFSA/GEH Exchange participant Tim Wagner. We met up with Juan and Gerard from Haghefilm, Amsterdam, and two students from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, Maggie Yin and HyunJu Jang. A great time was had by all and Tim made the perfect tour guide.

Today I visited the Motion Picture Department at George Eastman House (GEH) which is run by the delightful team of Nancy Kauffman and Dianna Ford. This department is responsible for the digitisation of photographic stills, posters and paper documents, all relating to Motion Pictures. One could say they are the sister department to Still image services at the NFSA, where I am based. I found many similarities between the two sections. One issue we both have is the ongoing battle of scanning collection material at as high a resolution as possible but keeping in mind the limited space available for the storage of the digital files.

The International Centre of Photography (ICP) is located at 1133 Avenue of the Americas between 43rd and 44th Street New York. The digitisation department and photographic collection is located on the 12th floor and, incidentally, has the best view from its lunchroom I have ever seen!

It was back in 1973 that Paul Simon immortalised colour photography in this song, but if he saw the writing on the wall, it was a long time coming. The last ever roll of 35mm roll of Kodachrome film will be processed, at Dwayne’s Photofinishing Lab in Kansas City, in December this year. Manufacture of the film stock was discontinued some time ago.