Rochester, N.Y., — To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the formation of the National Park Service, the George Eastman Museum presents Photography and America’s National Parks, an exhibition exploring the role of photography in the development of the parks and in shaping our perception and understanding of these landscapes. The exhibition will be on view from June 4 through October 2, 2016.
“From Yosemite being set aside as publicly held land in 1864 to Pinnacles National Park as the most recent addition in 2013, the lands that make up America’s national parks have been interpreted and enjoyed through photographs for more than 150 years,” said Jamie M. Allen, exhibition curator, Department of Photography, George Eastman Museum. “This exhibition, which spans the 1860s to the present, illuminates the history of the most significant national parks through lush landscape photographs.”
Photography and America’s National Parks includes more than 170 images from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographers to contemporary artists. Photography and America’s National Parks addresses the role that photographers such as Ansel Adams, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Frank Jay Haynes, William Henry Jackson, the Kolb brothers, Eadweard Muybridge, Eliot Porter, Carleton Watkins, and Edward Weston had in shaping our expectations for how the parks are depicted, and how photographs were disseminated to the public through stereographs and postcards. The exhibition will also showcase works by contemporary photographers such as Marion Belanger, Binh Danh, Sean McFarland, Sharon Harper, Mark Klett, Abelardo Morell, David Benjamin Sherry, and Byron Wolfe, whose work draws upon and subverts the history of images made within these natural landscapes.
Drawn primarily from the George Eastman Museum collection, the exhibition also includes works on loan that help to broaden our understanding of this subject. In addition, George Eastman’s travel albums from his trips to national park sites will be on display.
To complement the exhibition, the museum is co-publishing a book with Aperture, titled Picturing America’s National Parks. Available in June, the book features images related to the exhibition, an
Visit Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and Yosemite at the George Eastman Museum this summer/ Page 2 of 2
introductory essay by Jamie M. Allen discussing the relationship between the parks and
photography, and a foreword by Bruce Barnes, the Ron and Donna Fielding Director of the George
Eastman Museum. The book will be for sale at the Eastman Museum Store and online at
eastman.org/store.
For more information about public programming for the exhibition, including a film series in the
museum’s Dryden Theatre, visit eastman.org.
About the George Eastman Museum
Founded in 1947, the George Eastman Museum is the world’s oldest photography museum and one
of the largest film archives in the United States, located on the historic Rochester estate of
entrepreneur and philanthropist George Eastman, the pioneer of popular photography. Its holdings
comprise more than 450,000 photographs, 28,000 motion picture films, the world’s preeminent
collection of photographic and cinematographic technology, one of the leading libraries of books
related to photography and cinema, and extensive holdings of documents and other objects related
to George Eastman. As a research and teaching institution, the Eastman Museum has an active
publishing program and, through its two joint master’s degree programs with the University of
Rochester, makes critical contributions to the fields of film preservation and of photographic
preservation and collection management. For more information, visit eastman.org.
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Attn. Media: Promotional images for the Photography and America’s National Parks exhibition can
be downloaded here: https://eastmanmuseum.box.com/nationalparks.
