Editorial: Open House

From oops to ahh: (right) Lewis W. Hine's Powerhouse Mechanic was far from a grab shot. The George Eastman House's outtakes include one where the mechanic's fly is open.

If you have never seen a classic photograph in the raw, you are missing a wonderful experience. To get up close and personal with a vintage print of the blurry black-and-white mayhem of Robert Capa’s 1944 Normandy invasion or the delicate, eerie beauty of an albumen print of George N. Barnard’s 1865 Ruins of Charleston, South Carolina, gives new meaning to the words “to take great photographs, you should study great photographs.”

But where can you study them? Books? Copy prints? No matter how high-quality or well-intentioned, they are just so many Elvises on velvet compared with the real thing. You can have this experience at museums and galleries throughout the country. The J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles. The Library of Congress and Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The Art Institute of Chicago. New York City’s International Center of Photography and Museum of Modern Art.

But the jaw-dropping, pulse-racing, imagination-capturing capital of it all is the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York (www.eastman.org ; 585-271-3361). A six-hour drive from Boston, five-and-a-half from Detroit or Philadelphia, and a flight from most of America, Rochester isn’t central to much. Except, of course, photography. George Eastman founded the Eastman Kodak Company here in 1892. But to think of the Eastman House as simply the Museum of Big Yellow is to miss its sweep, scope, and variety.

Over the years, the museum has grown like a well-tended plant out of Eastman’s 50-room mansion. There’s a 52,000-volume library with virtually everything ever published on the medium (including every issue of Pop Photo), as well as a graduate-level school of photo conservation.

But what makes it worth the trip is the museum’s permanent collections and special exhibits (now through September 5, it’s Site Seeing: Photographic Excursions in Tourism).