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Image Vol. 20, No. 2 June, 1977
Journal of Photography and Motion Pictures of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Thomas Annan of Glasgow 1
"What Can You Do for Us, Barney?" 13
Influential Image: Edward Steichen's J. P. Morgan 32
IMAGE STAFF
Robert J. Doherty, Director
George C. Pratt, Director of Publications
W. Paul Rayner, Co-Editor
Contributing Editors:
John B. Kuiper, Director, Department of Film
Andrew Eskind, Assistant Director of the Museum
Robert A. Sobieszek, Associate Curator, 19th Century Photography
William Jenkins, Associate Curator, 20th Century Photography
Philip L. Condax, Associate Curator, Apparatus and Equipment
Marshall Deutelbaum, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film
Martha Jenks, Director of Archives
Roger Bruce, Director of Education Department
Ann McCabe, Registrar
Walter Clark, Consultant on Conservation
Rudolf Kingslake, Consultant on Lenses and Shutters
Eaton S. Lothrop, Jr., Consultant on Cameras
Martin L. Scott, Consultant on Technology
Corporate Members
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Eastman Kodak Company
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Hollinger Corporation
Polaroid Corporation
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BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Chairman, Dr. Wesley T. Hanson
First Vice Chairman, Andrew D. Wolfe
Second Vice Chairman, Mrs. Daniel G. Kennedy
Treasurer, Alexander D. Hargrave
Secretary, Mrs. Arthur L. Stern III
Bruce Bates
Robert J. Doherty
Walter A. Fallon
Sherman Farnham
Frank M. Hutchins
William E. Lee
Dr. Paul A. Miller
Robert Sherman
David L. Strout
Robert Taub
W. Allen Wallis
Frederic S. Welsh
About the Contributors
Anita V. Mozley is Curator of Photography at
Stanford University Museum and Art Gallery.
Robert McCracken Peck is Assistant to the
Director of the Public Museum at The Academy
of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Herbert
Reynolds is an intern at IMP/GEH and will
shortly be joining the staff of the Museum's
Film Department.
Image is published four times a year for the International Museum of Photography Associate Members and libraries by
International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House Inc., 900 East Avenue, Rochester, New York 14607.
Single copies are available at $3.50 each. Subscriptions are available to libraries at $13.00 per year (4 issues). For overseas
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Copyright 1977 by International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.
Front Cover: DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (Robertson,
1920): Martha Mansfield and John Barrymore. Back
Cover: the same, but with a difference. A splendid
print of this was discovered in a disused area adjoining
an old projection booth and added to the IMP/GEH
film collection.

Thomas Annan of Glasgow
Anita V. Mozley
This is another paper read at the symposium
"The Art History of Photography: Recent Investigations,"
sponsored by IMP/GEH, where
it was held in February, 1975. The symposium
was organized by Robert A. Sobieszek.
He was a commercial photographer, earlier
trained as a copperplate engraver, who opened
a calotype printing establishment in Woodlands,
a western district of Glasgow, in 1855. During
the almost thirty years of his activity, he became
the documentarian of particularly Scottish
subjects, and his most important photographs
deal with events in the civic and cultural life
of Glasgow, a city that by the time he lived
and worked in it had lost almost all vestiges
of its eighteenth-century Georgian splendor and
was beset with every evil of the industrial revolution.
The role he played for his contemporaries
seems to have been to conserve, by his
photographs, whatever was rich and fine about
the city, and to portray what was forwardlooking
and a source of contemporary pride.
He photographed the buildings and the faculty
of the ancient University of Glasgow, the old
country homes of its gentry, the stained glass
windows of its cathedral, the innovative waterworks
(that thirty-five miles of pipeline inaugurated
by Queen Victoria in 1859), and the
monuments, buildings and parks of what was,
by the mid-nineteenth century, the second
most populous city in Great Britain. But most
importantly, for us now, he photographed the
hideously foul and densely populated core of
the city: the closes, wynds and vennels in its
oldest district. It is this work, his Old Closes,
Streets & Etc., photographs made in 1868 and
1877, by which we chiefly know him, and in
which he displays at highest pitch his brillance
as a photographer and his humanity.
This work, forty carbon prints bound in
quarto presentation albums published by the
Glasgow City Improvements Trust in an edition
of 100, is one in which social and economic
history and the history of photography
meet at equally intense levels. Annan was
commissioned in 1868 by the Improvements
Trust to make a record of old buildings in the
central city which would be swept away by a
redevelopment scheme — a plan that would
open up the narrow streets, and replace the
old "made-down" Georgian houses with apartments
which would better serve, from a sanitary
and moral point of view, the members of the
industrious poor who lived in them. The photographs
he took are the first thorough-going
documents of a Victorian urban slum, and they
are of the slum that was said to be the worst
in all of Great Britain. The Trust itself, to
which Annan calls attention by his photographs,
was the first major redevelopment
scheme in nineteenth-century Great Britain. So
there are several firsts, worsts and bests connected
with Thomas Annan's Old Closes,
Streets & Etc.
The Trust had simply wanted a record of old
buildings that would be torn down, of those
that were interesting from "a historical point
of view." While Annan gives us that record, he
also gives us a more intimate glimpse of life
in those closes, wynds and vennels, for he
includes their denizens. It was not until two
decades later, in the work of Jacob Riis, who
took his camera into the back streets and
alleys of New York, that we find a comparable
photographic document of a nineteenth-century
urban slum.
As for documents in other graphic media,
they can be found in temperance tracts, periodicals
and social histories of the period. Henry
Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor,
issued first in the London Chronicle in a series
beginning in 1851, and in expanded treatment
in bound volumes in the early 1860s, was illustrated
by engravings said to be from photographs.
But these are studio shots which have
been transplanted to an outdoor urban setting
with the help of the engraving artist. Their
effect is not much different nor much more
revealing of social arrangements than the
widely circulated prints of individual street
criers and tradesmen of the eighteenth century.
The characters are isolated and have
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only a general identity, a classification that is
bestowed by the accoutrements of their trades.
The very mechanics of producing illustrations
for a paper such as the Illustrated London
News militated against the realism available
to the photographer. In an effort to speed
up the process of making a woodblock illustration
ready for the press, its separate parts
were farmed out to specialists, each of whom
worked on his part simultaneously, and then
returned it to the offices of the paper for the
final assembly, made by the engraver-in-residence.
Stock scenes were kept on hand, ready
for any particular need, and could be recognized
as they appeared in the depiction of
widely varying scenes. But two artists, both of
them French, approached the subject of the
Victorian British slum with the close and unconventional
observation available to the photographer:
Gavarni, in his series "The English
at Home," of 1851 and 1852, and Gustav
Dore, in his illustrations of 1869 to London, A
Pilgrimage.
E. D. H. Johnson, in "Victorian Artists and
the Urban Milieu," published in The Victorian
City, speaks of the evasion of urban subjects
in Annan's time: "No aspect of the Victorian
landscape would seem to have been more
obtrusively evident than the manufacturing
centers springing up in the wake of the Industrial
Revolution. Yet this kind of scene . . .
had strangely little impact on the imagination
of English artists of the age. The catalogue of
the Exhibition of the Art Treasures of the
United Kingdom at Manchester in 1857 lists
virtually no industrial views. . . . The tone of
savage mockery, traceable back through Rowlandson
and Gillray to Hogarth was uncongenial
to the Victorian temper of mind." The
formalism of the Pre-Raphaelites rejected the
notion (advanced by John L. Tupper in the
Pre-Raphaelite periodical, Germ) that art, to
realize its humanizing function, should "be
more directly conversant with the things, incidents,
and influences which surround and
constitute the living work of those whom Art
proposes to improve. . . ." While William
Powell Frith's The Railway Station included
class contrasts, they were incidental to the
general bustle of the scene, and G. F. Watts'
Found Drowned and The Irish Famine sympathize
with the destitute, but in a general,
thematic way. Unpleasant subject matter, for
the most part, did not find its place within the
heavily carved and gilded frame that set off
the tasteful Victorian painted view.
Was there no alternative in the numerous
exhibitions of photography and in the widely
published view albums? War (in the Crimea)
and famine and mutiny in a distant but Britishdominated
land (India) seem to be the only
subjects reflecting social crisis that were
documented. In this regard, photography remained
in thrall to painting. Francis Frith, "The
Gossiping Photographer," did not converse
with the urban poor, and John Thomson's
Street Life in London, illustrated with photographs
"taken from life expressly for this
publication," sometimes hits the mark in the
combination of recorded conversation and
view, but more often strays widely.
It is to these photographs of Annan's, then,
that we finally turn for a convincing pictorial
description of the habitations of the "poorer
classes," and for the earliest glimpse we can
have of them in their confining dens. Still,
there is something lacking, we must admit.
No text accompanies the photographs as they
were published in Annan's lifetime. We do not
even know to what extent Annan sought their
presence in his pictures. Perhaps our glimpse
is given gratuitously; perhaps they have come
out of their dark and dank holes — up from
the cellars, down from the common stair —
only to stare back at this extraordinarily tall
man with his cumbersome photographic gear
who had dared to venture off the main thoroughfares
of Glasgow into these malodorous
caverns, where even preachers, teachers and
doctors would not venture without the support
of a policeman. The Trust, which had commissioned
Annan, was interested in buildings.
2

He gives us buildings and their inhabitants.
We have no evidence of his having invited the
presence of the inhabitants; until more evidence
is available, we can only be grateful
that he accepted and recorded their presence.
Still, he never, to my knowledge, went down
into the cellars with his camera, or up the
common stair. He has left no written record,
to present public knowledge, of his impressions
of this important subject that he made,
however inadvertently, his own. He himself,
after all his memorializing of the brighter
aspects of his city, the city he honored in
his various publications, may have had ambivalent
feeling about what he had done,
what he had given pictorial proof to, in this
series of documentary photographs.
Annan was, we must remember, a successful
"merchant of Glasgow." He was described
thus when he traveled to Austria in 1883 to
obtain patent rights for Karl Klic's photogravure
process. At his death he was chiefly remembered
for his introduction of permanent
printing processes in photography: for his
carbon prints and his firm's excellent photogravure
prints. His work in copying paintings
was widely respected. He had always advanced
his business, in size and scope of
operation, from the early days at Woodlands.
By the time of his death, he had established
at Lenzie, a suburb of Glasgow, a place less
smoky and congested than the city, a printing
establishment comparable to that established
by George Washington Wilson at
Aberdeen and Francis Frith at Reigate. A
contemporary comparison would be with
Modernage in New York and with General
Graphics in San Francisco, where mural-size
photographs are produced. He seems to have
left off photographing by the 1880s, and to
have become the administrator of a printing
firm, a man of broad culture, one acquainted
with the arts, one interested in the history of
his medium and of his country; an honored
citizen.
born at Darsie, Fife, the son of a flax-spinner
and miller, and was early apprenticed to a
copperplate engraver, for whom he did fine
free-hand inscriptions.
It seems curious that he should set himself
up as a calotype printer. Fox Talbot's calotype
printing establishment at Reading had
been closed in 1848; the wet-collodion
process, introduced in 1851, was increasingly
used. Still, in 1855 and 1856 Roger Fenton's
Crimea War negatives were being printed in
a sizable calotype edition at Manchester. This,
however, as the Gernsheims note in their
History of Photography, was the last major
calotype publication. Margaret Harker, in her
essay, "Annans of Glasgow," published in the
British Journal of Photography in October and
November of 1973, speculates that Annan was
a friend of David Octavius Hill in 1855, and
that he counted on printing the negatives that
Hill and Robert Adamson had made in Edinburgh
in the 1840s. Another factor that may
have determined the nature of Annan's initial
venture into photography was his devotion to
the work of Fox Talbot (Annan would later
name one of his premises "Talbot Cottage" in
honor of the originator of the calotype
process).
The first notice that I have found of Annan
as a commercial photographer appears in the
Journal of the Photographic Society early on
in his new career, in September of 1855.
In a letter signed "yours respectfully," Berwick
and Annan described the combinationprinting
process used to produce a photograph
that they had recently exhibited in
Annan was twenty-six years old when he
opened his calotype printing establishment in
association with a young Dr. Berwick, a chemist
and an amateur of photography. He was
3

Glasgow:
In the Photographic Exhibition in connection
with the British Association in
Glasgow, there is a picture exhibited by
us, on which there is reference made to
your Journal for a description of the process
by means of which it is obtained, trusting
you will in your September number find
space for that purpose, and that it may prove
interesting to your numerous circle of readers,
as well as to those who may have seen
the exemplification of it.
It is printed from two different negatives.
First, a landscape or some other favorite
view is to be taken in the usual manner (the
one in question is a winding avenue with
overhanging shady trees), using the landscape
lens in order to obtain fine definition
and distinctness of detail. Another negative
is then to be taken of some individual or
individuals to be introduced into the view
(in this we have chosen a lady resting on an
old rough root of a tree with a basket of
flowers in the foreground). The portrait negative
is taken in the shade, in the same manner
as portraits are usually taken, with portrait
lenses. A copy of the latter negative is
then printed, and the figure thereon very
accurately and neatly cut out of the sheet,
and after soaking it well in China ink, it is
pasted on the landscape negative in the
most convenient and telling position. The
rest of the sheet from which the figure was
cut is also blackened with China ink and
pasted on the portrait negative, covering all
except the figure. A copy of the landscape is
then printed with the blackened figure on it,
which of course will leave a white untouched
space, the shape and outline of the figure.
The copy of the landscape is then placed
over the portrait negative, and then printed
to the desired intensity, having of course all
4

the other parts of the picture except the figure
carefully excluded from light. The great
difficulty in the process is in making the
figure fit accurately in the white space; but
when this is done, the effect is very fine
indeed, the rotundity and relief given to the
picture far surpassing that obtained from
artificial backgrounds.
Their object, then, the avoidance of the unnaturalness
of studio backdrops, was different
from Rejlander's, who exhibited his moralistic
magnum opus of combination printing, The
Two Ways of Life, in 1857. But they do seem to
claim, by this letter to the Photographic Journal,
that their method was original, or at least not
widely practised.
In 1857 Berwick left the business, and Annan
moved on his own to 116 Sauchiehall Street,
at the northwest corner of its junction with
Hope Street, close to the center of Glasgow.
Here he styled himself simply "Thomas Annan,
Photographer," and dropped any reference to
a specialty in calotype printing; nor is there
again a published notice of an interest in
combination printing. The move was a sign of
prosperity. Sauchiehall Street was then the
principal street on the north side of Glasgow,
and was known, as is customary in second
cities, by reference to London: it was called
"the Oxford Street of Glasgow." It was the
main avenue out to the West End, the district
of fine residences, across town from the East
End slums. It was "lined with fashionable shops
and elegant dwelling houses." Annan's business
there was based on fine-quality reproduction
of paintings and other works of art; he also
took photographs of the interiors and exteriors
of county mansions and landscape scenes for
publication either as loose prints or to be sold
in albums — the stock-in-trade, in other words,
of a commercial photographer. His business
grew; in 1859 he moved to larger quarters
nearby and there set up a portrait studio. In
the same year he established photographic
printing works at Burbank Road, Hamilton; this
was the site of his "Talbot Cottage."
Annan's trade card of 1861 emphasizes the
application of photography to copy work, with
its photograph of a drawing of the engines of
the S.S. St. Andrew, and at the same time defines
the scope of Annan's activity. In choosing
this illustration for his trade, certainly Annan
bows to the preeminent position of Glasgow
in shipbuilding and the manufacture of
ships' engines. The choice also reflects the
history of Glasgow in this preeminence: it was
there that the first regular steamship service in
Great Britain, or in Europe, for that matter, was
started (in 1812), and, further, it was in the late
eighteenth century that James Watt, working at
Glasgow University, observed the principle that
would lead to the use of steam to power
engines.
Annan was meanwhile sure that his photographs
were seen in the exhibitions throughout
Great Britain in which photographs were judged
from an aesthetic point of view. To these he
sent landscapes and portraits, which were
regularly noticed in the contemporary journals
of photography. The London-based reviewers
always referred to him as "Annan of Glasgow,"
and on one important occasion his first
name was wrongly given. It is the large size of
his photographs and the excellence of their
tone that is chiefly noted. The subjects are
usually Scottish scenery: "Inversnaid Waterfall,"
said by the British Journal of Photography
to be "a picture of great beauty and force," was
one of fifteen that Annan exhibited in 1861.
Although he was judged, in early exhibitions,
to be in the running for prizes with Maxwell
Lyte, James Mudd, Roger Fenton and Vernon
Heath, he does not come in first in favor until
1865, when his "Dumbarton Castle" won the
prize for the best Scottish landscape at the
Exhibition of the Photographic Society of Scotland.
It was of that exhibition that a reviewer
commented:
As in nearly all collections of photographs,
manipulation triumphs over mind. About
twenty of the pictures exhibited are the result
of intellect; about 600 result from the
careful use of lenses, cameras, and chemicals;
and the remaining few have certainly
not benefited by either. Photographs are now
becoming so uniformly good that perfect
manipulation will pass unnoticed, if it be not
recommended by some more brilliant
qualities.
Annan, then, was honored on both counts
and called "not only ... a successful landscape
photographer, but also ... a master of
portrait photography and reproduction."
By then, according to notations in the catalogues
for the exhibitions of the Royal Photographic
Society of London, Annan was again
using a wet-collodion process, although for at
least two years he exhibited prints made from
dry-plate negatives, particularly Russell's tannin
process. The advantages of the process,
first reviewed in July of 1862, were summed up
in the August 15th issue of the Journal: it is
simple, not dependent upon the mechanical
state of the collodion, a sensitizing bath in
ordinary working condition is sufficient, the
development of the latent image is under complete
control, it gives great intensity, affords
excellent tone, the prepared plates keep well
both before and after exposure, and "the silver,
in the development, is thrown down in a very
finely divided state, and it is thus more favorable
for obtaining extreme sharpness."
It is useful, I think, to turn to the following
resume of the various available processes that
appeared in a review of an exhibition of 1862.
The reviewer defines, along the way, the standard
by which the excellence of photographic
prints was then judged.
In point of numbers, wet collodion, it may
easily be imagined, stands first. Nearly nineteen
out of every twenty specimens are the
result of the process. . . . But when we
place beside them . . . exquisite specimens
produced by the collodio-albumen process,
it is impossible to doubt that in all that
gives beauty and character to a photograph
. . . softness, aerial perspective extending
to the most remote and vanishing distances,
5

distinctness without harsh opposition of light
and shadow in the delineation of reflexions in
water ... in all, in short, which tests the
merits of any one mode of manipulation, this
form of the dry process is capable, at the
least, of equalling the effects of wet collodion.
Of other dry plate processes, the reviewer
notes the tannin, finding "several specimens
of a very high order," among them "Loch Ranza,
Arran," by Annan, which, he said, could
"hardly be excelled for fine aerial effect."
And, a further note on processes in use, the
reviewer concludes: "We have not noticed a
single calotype."
In 1863, Annan was elected a member of
the Photographic Society of London, and a
note on the exhibition of the society for that
year calls attention to "some very fine landscape
subjects, of great photographic excellence
and high artistic merit." But it was hard
then, as it is now, for one who lived at such
a distance from the center of photographic
activity to be widely recognized in that center.
The reviewer continues: "His works are but
little known in London; but from this time
forth he must rank amongst our first-class
artists." Among the photographs that appear
to have been of exceptional interest from the
mid-1860s are "a delicious panorama, 'Willows
by the Watercourses,' and some snow scenes,
in which he has perfectly mastered the difficulty
of these difficult subjects."
While Annan exhibited these landscapes
throughout the 1860s and 1870s, in his professional
work he appeared to continue to
devote himself to the photographic reproduction
of paintings and drawings. He had been
producing reproductions for the Glasgow Art
Union since 1863 and in 1865, D. O. Hill asked
him to photograph the painting for which Hill
and Adamson had made calotype portraits in
the 1840s, The Signing of the Deed of Demission,
a huge canvas of that significant
occasion in the history of the Scottish church
that Hill finally completed in 1861. According
to Margaret Harker, Annan had a camera specially
constructed for the purpose; Dallmeyer
of London designed the lens. The photographs
were taken out-of-doors in three negative sizes,
the largest of them being 48 x 21 1 A in. Carbon
prints were made from each of Annan's nega­
7

fives at Joseph Wilson Swan's factory at Newcastle-on-Tyne
in June of 1866; each negative
was printed in an edition of one thousand.
This experience, as it turned out, was crucial
to Annan's later major publications, for it was
through this asociation with Swan that Annan
almost immediately secured rights to use his
carbon process in Scotland.
By the mid-1850s, photographers had begun
searching avidly for methods of permanent
printing, for prints then tended to fade away,
and one of the vindications of photography,
that it would preserve what time would otherwise
ravage (archaeological finds, for instance),
would be a dead letter. Supported by Prince
Albert, the London Photographic Society had
established in the early 1850s a committee to
investigate possible methods of permanent
printing, and Swan's carbon method, finally
workable in 1866, was to revolutionize the
photographic illustration of publications in its
assurance of this sought-after permanence, as
well as in its promise of large editions of consistent
quality.
8
Upon being granted the right to use Swan's
process, Annan immediately turned to the production
of illustrated publications, the first of
which was Photographs of the Painted Windows
of Glasgow Cathedral of 1867. Two views of
the cathedral and a text by Annan introduced
the main subject, the windows made in Munich,
which had been installed in 1864. His comment
on the windows is interesting, in light of our
knowledge that the commission for the designs
was much sought after by the English
Pre-Raphaelites, and that the completed designs
have been lately maligned from an
aesthetic point of view: "The windows undoubtedly
constitute the greatest work of the
kind undertaken in Great Britain, excelling all
others in the completeness of the plan, and
the unity of purpose with which it has been
carried out." In 1870 James Maclehose, Publisher
to the University, issued The Old Country
Houses of the Old Glasgow Gentry, in
which one hundred houses were illustrated, as
the title page tells us, with "permanent photographs
by Annan." In this first edition, 112
copies were printed for sale. Memorials of the
Old College of Glasgow, which contained views
of the building and portraits of the faculty by
Annan, was published in 1871, the same year
in which several albums of Old Closes, Streets
& Etc. were made up. The albums contained
thirty albumen prints. By 1877, Annan established
his printing works at Lenzie, a village
about eight miles to the east of Glasgow. As a
further step in his achievement of permanent,
large-scale production of photographic prints,
he obtained, in 1883, rights for Great Britain
to the heliogravure process of Karl Klic of
Vienna. In 1886, Annan was one of the organizers
of the first photographic exhibition in
Scotland to include the classification: "Illustrations
of the history of photography, early
Daguerreotypes, Calotypes, etc."; his contribution
to the exhibition of negatives by D. O. Hill
and Robert Adamson was entered under the
corporate name of "T. & R. Annan & Son," and
certain photographs exhibited In the 1880s,
enlargements of his earlier work, were also
exhibited under that name, so we may assume
that by this time he was no longer active as a
photographer. A reviewer of the exhibition
noted that "among the large and comprehensive
collection of T. & R. Annan, we observe
an autotype four feet in dimensions." When
Annan died, in 1887, the writer of his obituary
found that because of "his intolerance of everything
below the best" it was "natural that he
should have felt dissatisfied with the uncertain
permanence of silver prints and have been one
of the first to introduce carbon printing."
By this brief history, I have sought to establish
the scope of Thomas Annan's activity, and
to emphasize the experience and personal
characteristics that he brought to the making
and publication of the Old Glasgow album. He
was outstanding in both technical manipulation
and in his sense of the aesthetics of the camera.
A friend of painters, his abilities were often
put to the service of copying their work. There
is a sort of modesty in this, as well as commercial
advantage. He was very much a man
of Scotland; almost without exception, it was
the landscape of Scotland that he photographed.
As a man of Glasgow, he most often turned

his camera to memorializing its traditional aspects
and its eminent men. In his publication
of series of photographs on a single subject,
he shows himself to be unusually conscious of
the documentary possibilities of his medium.
He was attracted by "completeness of plan,
and unity of purpose," to use his own words.
All of his publications give evidence of his
orderly method of documentation. But it is Old
Closes that is the most significant to us, because
its subject is one of contemporary relevance
and great historic resonance. Annan's
photographs invite investigation into his subject;
they must not be let go as attractive
components of nostalgic picture books, accompanied
only by casual remarks about nineteenthcentury
urban life. They should be used by
historians to complement the widely published
sanitation reports and discussions of nineteenth-century
urban planning. It is amazing
that they have not been so used.
The increase of poor people living in cities
and the lack of increase in housing accommodations
had been a pressing problem in Great
Britain since at least the third decade of the
nineteenth-century. It was particularly felt in
Glasgow, even then on its rise to the position
of foremost industrial city in the nation. The
equation between public health and density of
population, with its accompanying unsanitary
conditions, was certainly made during the
cholera epidemics that struck at least once a
decade (until 1867) during Annan's lifetime. As
M. W. Flinn describes it in his introduction to
Edwin Chadwich's Report of 1842, cholera
"stirred even the moribund, degraded, unreformed
municipal corporations into fits of unwonted
sanitary activity. It was the clearest
warning of the lethal propensities of the swollen
towns of the new industrial era."
Even before the immigration of the Irish, who
sought Glasgow as a refuge during the potato
famine of the mid-1840s — at a rate of 43,000
in four months at the famine's height — Glasgow
had been something of a hell-hole, and
was in fact compared to "the dark hole of
Calcutta." In 1839, Lord Shaftesbury noted in
his diary:
Walked through the dreadful parts of this
amazing city; it is a small square plot intersected
by small alleys, like gutters, crammed
with houses, dunghills, and human beings;
9

hence arise nine-tenths of the crime in
Glasgow; and well it may. Health would be
impossible in such a climate; the air tainted
by exhalation from the most stinking and
stagnant sources, a pavement never dry, in
lanes not broad enough to admit a wheelbarrow.
And is moral propriety and moral
cleanliness, so to speak, more probable?
Quite the reverse.
It was not until 1848 that public health officials
understood the relation of polluted water
supply to the incidence of cholera; Glasgow
finally secured pure water for its citizens in
1859, when Queen Victoria opened the pipeline
from Loch Katrine, about thirty-five miles
to the north. Was it a coincidence, we might
ask, in an effort to understand Annan, that he
also took a series of views along the pipeline
that would bring healthful water to the inhabitants
of the slums?
While cholera was epidemic in the closes,
wynds and vennels, typhus was endemic to
them; it also spread outside them, and became
the disease of Victorian city-dwellers, a cause
for widespread alarm and attention to the
darker parts of the city where disease
germinated.
These are suggestions of the circumstances
of life of the people who inhabit Annan's
photographs; the lack of sanitation was, as the
Improvement Trust rightly thought, determined
by the "structural arrangements" of their housing.
Without going into the complicated history
of the Scottish laws that allowed several different
people to own flats in one structure, and
then "make them down," or, as we would say,
"subdivide them," it is sufficient for our description
to say that there was a greater incidence
of families living in one room in Glasgow
than anywhere else in Victorian Great Britain.
The practice of taking in lodgers, particularly
during the influx of the destitute Irish during
the 1840s, increased the number of people per
cubic foot of air space. While Glasgow, in the
years between 1840 and 1843 built three new
railroad stations, a club, four banks, a merchants'
house, a city hall, a corn exchange,
lunatic asylum, thirteen Presbyterian churches

and a Catholic chapel, scant attention was paid
to housing in the city's center. As the move to
the West End from the central city became
fashionable, the old houses of five or six rooms,
which had previously accommodated one family,
were subdivided, without any change of
structure to secure isolation. Existing tenements
were similarly subdivided, seedy as they might
already be. The end result of decades of subdividing
led to such house addresses as one
reported by James Burn Russell, Medical Officer
of Health for Glasgow: "Bridgegate, No. 29,
back landing, stair first left, 3 up, right lobby,
door facing." Privys, if they existed, were on a
dark common stair. James Burn Russell describes
the Scottish stair, the equivalent of the
English court:
In their worst form, it is hard to say what
the Scotch [sic] common stair is but a dark
noisome tunnel buried in the centre of the
tenement, and impervious both to light and
air, excepting the fetid air which is continuous
and undiluted from the house along
the lobbies and down to the close, from
which you start on your perilous and tedious
ascent.
The city's first move to remedy the situation
came in 1846, when the Town Council began
to acquire property in the worst sections. The
need for sanitary improvement is referred to
in the following introduction to the Parliamentary
Bill that approved the unprecedented redevelopment
scheme of 1866:
Whereas various Portions of the City of
Glasgow are so built, and the Buildings
thereon are so densely inhabited as to be
highly injurious to the moral and physical
Welfare of the Inhabitants, and many of the
Thoroughfares are narrow, circuitous, and it
would be of public and local advantage if
various Houses and Buildings were taken
down, and those Portions of the said City
reconstituted, and new Streets were constructed
in and through various Parts of said
City, and several of the existing Streets
altered and widened and diverted . . ." and
so forth.
This Improvement Trust act has been called
by the historian C. M. Allen the "first massive
municipal intervention [in Britain] to sweep away
the most insanitary and dilapidated and archaic
central urban areas and to replan them on a
modern basis, and the first recognition that a
free market and private philanthropy and public
health regulation could not provide an adequate
solution to overcrowded slums," which,
it was then recognized, must be under the
authority of the civic government.
At the same time, it appears, the rather
more commercially insistent advance of railroad
interests made the city fathers act. Just
as the old university buildings were destroyed
to make room for a passenger and goods station
on the university's grounds in High Street,
so the promotion of railway schemes in the
1860s, involving the construction of other new
stations, provided the Town Council with the
opportunity to apply to Parliament for an enactment
of a redevelopment scheme.
What one wants to do, really, faced with
Annan's photographs of Glasgow's slums, is to
find apposite texts for them, to flesh them out
a bit with words. Some of this material is
available in the Glasgow Corporation archive,
in the architect's paln book for the redevelopment
scheme, and in city directories of the
period. By the use of these documents, public
record can be approximately matched to
Annan's photographs, and the full message of
his work brought home.
A brief excursion into story of the Gorbals
section afforded this pictorial history, which,
through the documents above named, can be
rigorously defined: Gorbals in 1828, from
"Select Views of Glasgow and Its Environs,"
engraved by Joseph Swan, and showing particularly
the chapel built by Sir George Elphinstone
of Blythswood, Burgess and Provost of
the city, who, in the time of James VI, was
knighted, Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Lord
of Session, and in the reign of Charles I, Lord
Justice Clerk. When he died in 1634, he was
buried in this chapel. By 1790 the chapel had
been sold, and the dwelling and place of worship
of the Lords of Gorbals turned into small
shops and houses for the poorer classes.
Annan photographed the chapel-bar in 1868,
and again in 1870. By then the 17th-century
tower had been destroyed, the rest was about
to go, and new tenements were being built.
I should emphasize that I did not come to
Annan's photographs with any particular interest
in the social history of a city I had then
never visited. It was the power of the photographs
and the thoroughness of the photographer's
method that made me want to know
11

the story of which they are the evidence. But
through them, and through a similar reaction
to Muybridge's photographs of Central America,
(which I initially took at their aesthetic face
value, but which are now, having been shown
to city planners and people in charge of restoration
in Central America, being used for the
documentary qualities inherent in them), I have
come to believe that photographs such as
Annan's Old Closes — primary social documents
— are wasted if they are used only as
examples of fine photography in histories of
the medium. They offer instead, with the necessary
complement of archival materials, the
completion of a picture we might have of the
past. With this completion they become bona
fide documents. They invite us to know fully
this particular and important subject as it was
in Annan's day. The possibility of this richer
picture, this thorough description, is one of
the offerings of representational photography,
and one which justifies our interest in it to a
far greater extent than does an exclusive concern
with the technology and the aesthetics of
the medium.
12
Notes
I am grateful to Jerald C. Maddox, Curator of Photography
of the Library of Congress, for supplying me with
notes on the Annan albums of albumen prints in the
Mitchell Library, Glasgow, and with notes from the
Minute Book of the Trustees of the Improvements Act of
1866, which define the Trustees' commission to the
photographer. Without his work, even this brief discussion
would have been impossible.
Aside from the sources noted in the text, the following
sources have been consulted for the economic, social,
and sanitary history of Glasgow's slums.
Allan, C. M. "The Genesis of British Urban Redevelopment
with Special Reference to Glasgow." Economic
History Review, Second Series, vol. XVII, no. 3 (1965).
Best, G. F. A. "The Scottish Victorian City." Victorian
Studies, vol. XI, no. 3 (1968).
British Journal of Photography, 19 April 1878 (for
Annan's establishment at Lenzie), and 23 December 1887
(for his obituary).
Flinn, M. W., ed. Report on the Sanitary Condition of
the Labouring Population of Great Britain by Edwin
Chadwick, 1842. Edinburgh, 1965.
Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison. The History of Photography
from the camera obscura to the beginning of the
modern era. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1969.
(for the full circle of the history of photography of which
this essay is a minute segment).
Illustrated London News, 22 January 1859. (for the inauguration
of Glasgow's Municipal Waterworks).
Kellett, J. R. "Glasgow's Railways, 1830-80: a Study in
a 'Natural Growth.' " Economic History Review, Second
Series, vol. XVII, no. 2 (1964).
James Burn Russell, various articles on housing and
sanitary reform published in, Proceedings of the Philosophical
Society of Glasgow, particularly, "On the Immediate
Results of the Operations of the Glasgow Improvement
Trust . . ." vol. IX (1873-75); and, "On the
'Ticketed' Houses of Glasgow . . ." vol. XX (1888-89).
Young, William. Introduction to The Old Closes &
Streets of Glasgow, Thomas Annan. Glasgow: James
Maclehose & Sons, 1900, illustrated with photogravure
plates by (James Craig) Annan.

"What Can You Do tor Us,
Barney?"
Four Decades of Film Collecting: An Interview with James Card
13

On May 31 James Card retires as curator of
motion pictures and director of the Department
of Film at the International Museum of Photography
at George Eastman House after nearly
twenty-nine years with the institution. He will
be succeeded by Dr. John B. Kuiper, formerly
head of the Motion Picture Section and presently
chief of the Prints and Photographs
Division of the Library of Congress.
Born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in 1915, Card
majored in drama and theatre at Cleveland's
Western Reserve University. He was graduated
in 1938, having spent the academic year 1935-
36 attending the University of Heidelberg. Following
a season teaching high school in
Cleveland, he returned to Germany for the
summer of 1939 to conduct an individual film
project that would record Berlin and Danzig on
the brink of war. For more than a decade, in
fact, he was engaged in intermittent filmmaking
activity. A job with the National Youth
Administration from 1940 to 1941 occasioned
two shorts, and after joining the Army in December,
1942, he was assigned to the Signal
Corps Photo Center, where he continued to
work in film.
After the war, Card came to Rochester, New
York, as a director and cameraman for Eastman
Kodak's Informational Films Division; the
position led to an offer to join the Eastman
House staff in November, 1948. In the ensuing
time he has directed the motion picture activity
at the museum, expanding upon his private
collection to build one of the country's most
14
significant archives. His selection of film series
for exhibition at the museum attests to a high
degree of eclecticism; his spoken introductions
to the programs were discursive and alternately
reverential or iconoclastic, qualities that also
characterized his writings (though less informal)
which usually appeared in Image. An associate
professor at the University of Rochester, Card
also taught at Syracuse University and lectured
widely. Besides serving on several film festival
juries, he recently organized major retrospectives
of the films of Greta Garbo and Eleanor
Powell for the 1975 and 1976 Berlin Festivals
and directed the Telluride, Colorado, Festival
from 1974 to 1976.
Often close in his personal life to the stars
he admired — even adulated — on the screen,
Card never relinquished his devotion to the
great performers whom he considered preeminent
artists, even throughout a period of
widespread preoccupation with film directors.
Still regarding the cinema with the wide-eyed
enthusiasm he generated for movies as a boy,
he recalls with undiminished fondness the very
earliest pictures that thrilled him in his youth
and continues to extend his sympathies to a
great range of films, embracing the most unassuming
of entertainments. Coming upon a student
or researcher privately watching a film in
the museum, he would habitually interrupt the
screening to extol at least briefly the virtues of
the work at hand and thereby imply the highest
compliment to the taste and discernment of the
viewer he assumed to be sharing a heart-felt
communion. He further relished the position of
a discoverer and its attendant privilege of
authority; to alert others to a new-found treasure
was itself a joy, and his every delight was
sounded with a multitude of hyperbole, even
when he wed his effervescence to a sense of
critical serious-mindedness.
A life-long enticement to drama and acting
was manifest in Card's penchant for theatricality
and role-playing. He enjoyed enigma and
irony, as he acknowledged by choosing for
his personal emblem the mountebank Dr.
Caligari — a spieler for an illusory, dream-like
attraction as well as a guileful seducer lurking
behind a surface appearance of academic
respectability. (The figure of Caligari even appears
on Card's personal stationery and interoffice
memos.) Card will be remembered as
idiosyncratic, absolutist and controversial. He
could bring to bear mystification and obscurantism
to avoid the grinding, diurnal administrative
responsibilities necessary to maintaining
an archive. Yet it is not as a critic or historian,
nor precisely as an archivist, that Card leaves
his mark on the field. He established his reputation
and made his contribution principally as
a collector, a role for which his story is largely
his own. Consequently it was primarily to his
function and accomplishments as a collector
that we directed our attention in the following
interview, excerpted from three long sessions
which took place in late April and early May.
Lists of the films which Mr. Card directed and
of his published articles on the cinema follow.

Tell me about your earliest interests in film
and how you became a collector.
It was 1932 and really almost the bottom of
the Depression. We had what was probably
one of the earliest film societies in the socalled
Midwest back in Shaker Heights. The
film society sprang up as part of a theatre
group—a theatre group traditionally and consistently
losing money — and some of us got
the idea that maybe we could show some films
and boost up the kitty that way. So what really
gave us impetus to do that was that there was
a big motion picture strike or something in
Cleveland at this time, and all the film theatres
were closed, so our group started renting films
and showing them in one of the high school
auditoriums. Silent films, of course, and this
was 1932, so already they were becoming kind
of a rarity. And in the course of one of those
programs, one of the films that we rented from
New York was [James] Sibley Watson's THE
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER [1929]. 1 It so
happened that the print they sent us was incomplete—
there was only about three-quarters
of it there — and at this point I had never seen
any kind of an expressionist film. I still hadn't
even seen CALIGARI 2 at this point, and I was
absolutely so bowled over by the opening vistas
of a film like this that the first thing I had to
try to do was to see a complete print of it. And
then when I finally did locate a 16mm print of
USHER I got it, and I just so fell in love with
it I bought it, and that was the first film in what
was going to be a collection. The second was
CALIGARI . . . That's how I became a collector.
I realized then that it was fun to see films; but
to get a rare, esoteric or unique one, or a film
that you loved particularly well, and have it there
so that you could see it when you wanted to,
and you could have the excitement of revealing
these things to others, too — And that began
it; it was '32 when I first saw USHER. It was
'35 when I first was able to buy a print and
'36 when I bought my first print of CALIGARI,
in Germany.
In the very earliest days was it mostly by
purchase that you acquired different films?
Yes, that's how you start out — buying. Nobody's
going to give you anything, after all.
When you start to get a collection, then you
have things, a few things that other collectors
want very badly, and then you can do your
trading. But back in '35 and '36 I didn't know
any other collectors. The only things I could
get were those that might be available for
purchase. It wasn't really until the forties —
until after the war — that you began to find
individuals who had films. And of course a
good number of them were GIs who had
brought film back as loot in their barracks bag.
In many cases they weren't even particularly
interested — it was just something to grab,
you know, and some very interesting things
came back that way.
Were your first films 16mm?
Oh, almost all of them, yes. Although I
started early to get — no, I would say half and
half, come to think about it, 'cause the first
really big 35mm feature I got from a collector.
I'll tell you, a lot of these people that had
films weren't really collectors but they were
basement showmen. They made a big thing
out of having, usually, 35mm equipment in
their homes. In their basement, usually. And
they would simply get films so they would have
something to show their friends. And usually
the films that were available to them were
those that were of more interest to an archivist,
'cause they were those that for some reason
or another had been rejected or put aside —
didn't go well [commercially]. I remember this
one guy had his outfit, and I heard he had a
film he would be willing to sell because it
scared hell out of him [laughs], and that was
it literally. It was MACISTE IN HELL [1924],
[Guido] Brignone's thing with Bartolomeo
Pagano; and, you know, he does down to hell,
and all these devils are tormenting him and
everything, and this kid (it really made him
uncomfortable) sold me that film for fifty cents
a reel — 35mm, nitrate, beautiful print. Still in
the vaults right now. We've had it duped, of
course, but there it is — it's still there. If you
could find it now you probably couldn't buy it
for eight hundred bucks.
In those days, though, you had no equipment
to project?
I didn't, no. I started out like most. Most
kids of the twenties had Keystone Moviegraph
Projectors that you're supposed to run nothing
15

ut safety film on, but we would all — with a
Mechano set or something or other — build
extensions for them. I used to run nitrate film
but you'd have to hand crank it through, you
know, and it'd take forever to show a thousandfoot
reel. But we did. But that was always kid
stuff; the period when I began collecting, of
course, I didn't have any 35mm equipment. But
I would take 35mm prints just the same. Put
'em away against the day when — always
thinking, "Well, you know, maybe some day I
will get equipment."
What were your earliest interests? Were they
centered around actors, directors, national
cinemas?
Well, I think it's true to say that CALIGARI
was really a very strange kind of excitement.
I know a lot of us, before we ever had a
chance to see it, used to read a lot about it.
16
And like young people who are interested in
films, I guess we were always alert for the
grotesque, for the frightening, the shadowy —
the sensational kind of thing. And everything
we ever read about THE CABINET OF DR.
CALIGARI — just the name alone! Then if you
got to see any stills, they'd just pique your
curiosity to the point of — well, it was an
enormous build-up. And then when I finally got
to see the film, I mean, it was THE FALL OF
THE HOUSE OF USHER all over again: opening
up this total vista beyond anything I'd ever
seen in movies, going to regular theatres of
the day. So, collecting-wise and everything, it
was this kind of thing that interested me.
What I liked best to go to see when I went
to see a film downtown — I was interested, of
course, in the stars: Doug Fairbanks, John
Barrymore — these were my very special
heroes. And I would say that following their
adventures — before [we were] aware of
whether a film was good or not, the only
criterion there had to be, I think, for all of us,
was enormous, wonderful bravura action —
that was the thing of it. We demanded all this
action and some very strong kind of a star to
admire and emulate. This was a big thing in
those days, you know — we'd go to see something
like ROBIN HOOD [1922], and for months,
for the whole season thereafter, we were all
bow and arrow experts: we were all playing
Robin Hood. And I remember when Fairbanks
came out in THE MARK OF ZORRO [1920] it
turned us all into swordsmen, and when he did
DON Q [1925], whips blossomed out everywhere
— we were all being Fairbanks all over
the place. It was Chaplin's GOLD RUSH [1925],
all the Fairbanks pictures, all the Harold Lloyds
— these were really, really big events — exciting,
long-awaited. We were in such a stew of
waiting for THE BIG PARADE [1925], for example,
clipping out pictures and waiting. BIG
PARADE took me through World War I: I mean
we reenacted that scene-by-scene over and
over and over and over again. And I remember
the coming of BEAU GESTE [1926]—the first
production of that, the Herbert Brenon production
— was also a long-awaited event because
one of the boys' mothers actually used to read
us the book. Each weekend we'd all get together
and she'd read us about a chapter or
so. We were in such a sweat waiting for that
picture to come out. It was just absolutely the
most exciting time! Of course the picture didn't
let us down; that was another wonderful thing.
Neither did some of those great super ones
like BEN-HUR [1925]. . . . So the early days
were based on film-fanism and nothing more,
really, except for this fascination for what was
going on in German films.
I remember another German film that made
me realize there was something else cooking:
THE STRANGE CASE OF CAPTAIN RAMPER
[1927], 3 with Paul Wegener. It's unbelievable!
Do you know, I saw part of this film — they
used to run noon movies at school, as most of
the schools did. You'd see 'em two reels at a
time and sometimes you'd never get — I never
did get to see the whole picture of CAPTAIN
RAMPER, but this was real wild, baby. This was
about a polar explorer who was left behind in

the Arctic and he really goes, he turns into a
yeti — you know, his fingernails grow and hair
grows — He survives, but he's turned into a
real beast, a real abominable snowman. And
another party goes up there, and they find him
wandering around living off the land, and they
bring him back and exhibit him in a carnival.
It's that old, awful German thing of the human
monster — it just runs right through the whole
business of German films. This one really
bugged me.
Then the picture that turned me from a fan
into, I guess, into an absolute total dedicated
film guy was Fritz Lang's SIEGFRIED [1924].
I came to get that when we were looking for
exceptional films to show for our theatre group,
and we rented a beautiful, magnificent original
35mm release print of the original version,
which is almost a totally different film from
what you can see of it now — it was so totally
reedited when it was reissued with sound [in
1933]. And not only reedited, but all that were
available, I guess, were outtakes — it was made
up from outtakes. But that original print — there
was just something about it. The nuances of
the lighting in this forest that they had built in
the studio with total control of the light, and
Siegfried going through back-lighted with just
the tiniest little breeze stirring his hair: it was
so incredibly beautiful a film — unimaginably
beautiful. And that was the one, I guess, that
really, really tipped the balance. And the next
one coming — all of these things coming at a
kind of crucial time — I'd gone to see ALL
QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (this was
1930, of course), and I was very much impressed
by the film, and so forth. But it so
happened that the theatre across the street
from the theatre that was showing ALL QUIET
had Pabst's WESTFRONT 1918 [1930]. I went
and saw that right after the other one, and
then I had the revelation of the difference
between a "movie" and a creatively made film.
It was right there, and from that day on it was
just — there it went.
These experiences that you're describing are
happening to you as a teenager primarily. When
you began actually to collect film, to what extent
were you able to acquire the films that
had meant the most to you a decade earlier?
A very small part of it. I guess I started with,
of course, USHER and CALIGARI, and the third
18
was Murnau's FAUST [1926], which fit into this
pattern perfectly. From that point on it was just
a question of grabbing anything I could get
that was available.
Anything at all?
Yes, anything at all. It didn't matter what it
was. It could be a Pathe newsreel, or just anything
that was on film I wanted to have and
put into the collection. So after that beginning,
of going after films that meant something particularly,
I went on to be just an avid collector.
While you were in college you went to
Germany to study during 1935-36. What was
your motivation to go there?
It was absolutely film. It was the interest in
German films that sent me to Germany. It's a
strange thing, too: I remember that the only
reason that I applied for the scholarship to go
to study in Germany — not the only reason,
but the immediately motivating reason — was
that I was kind of a record collector, too —
just popular records — and for the first time
I heard a recording of the music from a
German musical. And this so intrigued me —
it sounded like something from another world,
that mythical world that they'd begun to build
up of Vienna and music and all the schmaltzy
stuff and everything. I listened to this record
and I thought, "It must really be so like that
over there." That's why I had to go and see
if it were really so, and I guess that's really
what took me. Of course, once in Germany
the university course was almost nothing —
I rarely found any time to go to any courses,
and when I did I found them ridiculous. I
wasn't interested in politics, and the political
situation permeated every kind of class no
matter what it was. . . .
Had you expected to find film activity still
going strong?
Being totally naive politically — I was aware,
of course, I had read some of the things that
a lot of the German artists had left and others
had been driven out of Germany. But to what
extent that had altered the whole complexion
of German filmmaking I was totally unaware
until I started looking at the pictures. I realized
that it just wasn't there any more except for
its ghost. . . .
You returned to Germany in 1939 just before
the war to work on a personal film and in fact
were involved with the making of several short
films in your early career. Did you ever think
that you might be interested in becoming a
filmmaker? Did that interest compete with your
curiosity as a collector?
Honestly I wasn't overwhelmingly committed
to make films. I thought I was because I loved
the medium so, and I thought, "This is what I
have to be doing." But then when the opportunity
came to collect films and just look at
them and love them without the hassle of trying
to make them yourself — it's kind of a
cop-out, but it's still easy, and it seems so
much more — Incidentally this is another reason
why I have the most vast, vast respect for
anybody who shoots a picture and finishes it
and gets it in the can — even a lousy picture.
It's kind of a miracle, because there are so
many things to be overcome. I can't think of
any work that's harder, more exhausting, more
frustrating. And so my admiration for Bunuel,
Truffaut, or Bergman, who not only get these
things — grind them out — but are grinding
out magnificent and fascinating things one
after another. They're just miracle workers.
And I'm sure that anybody who ever tried to
make a film knows this. ... I think great frustration
comes about when somebody insists
on casting himself as a creator if he should
be one of the appreciators rather than that.
Or maybe it's just a kind of laziness. Maybe
the frustrations, the problems, the grief are
just so much that you say, "Well, it's easier to
sit back and enjoy what someone else has
done." Maybe. . . .
So you found your proper place when you
left Kodak to become the first motion picture
curator of the newly-founded George Eastman
House?
Well, I wasn't a motion picture curator. I
was hired as "assistant to the curator." The
curator was Beaumont Newhall. The director
was General Oscar Solbert, who was the real,
real dynamic — he really got the House off the
ground and established whatever international
reputation it has through his years as its first
director. . . . But I don't think at that point when
Eastman House first started out that they had
in mind that they were going to have a curator
of motion pictures. There had been no provisions
even to have a motion picture collection.
So I was assistant to the curator. I was expected
to do just as much in photography. In

fact, my first assignment there was to make a
daguerreotype film, which meant that I literally
had to learn the history of the daguerreotype —
how to make one . . .
Your first assignment was to make instructional
films on photography?
They weren't really instructional films — they
were demonstrational films, really, to demonstrate
how a daguerreotype was made. Not to
teach anybody to make them but simply to
show this is how the process was done, and
similarly with the wet collodion process and
then another one for the making of the Talbotypes.
These three little films were put into
loop projectors and the idea was that you'd
press a button and look in and you'd see a
2 1 /2 minute film in there on these three different
processes. The problem is you can't get a loop
projector to work without breaking down after
the first fifty or sixty runs.
Had you been hired with — there must have
been some knowledge of your interest in film?
Yes, definitely. General Solbert knew that I
had this collection, and I think his original
hope was that I would stay at Kodak and they
would simply use my knowledge of film history
when they got around to the point that they
wanted to do something. This was always in
the back of his mind that he wanted to do
something with motion pictures; but, as I say,
[Eastman House] was originally planned to be
a museum of photography, and it was very
nebulous as to whether motion pictures were
really going to enter into that history. . . . The
first year was devoted simply to getting ready
to open to the public, from November of 1948
to November of 1949. Then after the museum
was a going thing, the Dryden Theatre was
built — the cornerstone was laid in 1950 —
and that was the recognition that there was
going to be motion picture activity. That decision
wasn't really formulated until 1950. Then
the theatre opened in 1951, and it was in that
same year that Eastman House began on its
own to start building a film collection.
Had the benefactors, George and Ellen
Dryden, proposed the gift of the theatre?
The General went to them and asked them
for money to build the theatre. He was very,
very keen on the motion picture end of things.
Beaumont Newhall as curator was a little bit
bemused by the whole idea, and I'm sure there
must have been times when he had the feeling
that it was assuming importance out of proportion
to the plan and the whole direction of the
museum, as far as he was concerned. And
personally, I don't think motion pictures have
anything to do with photography. They're two
such totally different media. As I've frequently
said, I don't think motion pictures have any
more to do with photography than the activity
of producing and interpreting x-rays has to do
with photography. It's a use of photography;
you use a photographic process in it, but it's
not photography at all.
Had General Solbert thought that he might
avail himself of your personal collection in the
earliest days?
It was very definitely in his mind, although
he never stated so flatly. He was aware that I
had it, and he'd seen my catalogue that I'd
worked out while I was still at Kodak. I'm sure
that in casting his own master plan for organizing
the House, it played a very large part.
It was at his invitation that you accepted the
position at the museum?
Yes.
How large was your collection at that point?
I had 850 titles listed.
Did the museum eventually acquire some of
your collection from you? What sort of arrangements
were worked out?
The first few years it was just there and they
were using it, and ultimately they purchased
the entire collection from me. ... I don't remember
just what year it was, but it was some
years later—I think not till '57 — that they
took over my collection.
You must have been, to some extent, actively
fighting for the inclusion of film at Eastman
House.
I didn't have to fight very hard. It was an
economic fight, because there was great willingness
on the part of General Solbert but
very little of the budget was allocated for that.
As a matter of fact, the really great strides that
we were able to make in collecting for the
House were thanks to General Edward Peck
Curtis, then one of our trustees, who was
Kodak's liaison man with Hollywood for many,
many years. He knew most of the heads of the
American motion picture industry intimately;
they all played golf together. And it was on
the basis of his telephone calls to them. He
was still at Kodak at this time, and he'd just
get on the phone and call Barney Balaban and
say, "Hey look, our people at George Eastman
House are interested in building a film collection;
what can you do for them, Barney?" And
Mr. Balaban would designate a liaison man, and
from that point I would take over and work with
the liaison man and we started getting Paramount
films. The same thing happened with all
of the other producers. The arrangement was
that they would lend us their negatives when
they existed, and at our expense we would
make a print for the collection. So, although
this was a green light, still the red light was on
as far as having funds was concerned. So it
went very, very slowly in those first years, even
though theoretically the vaults were open to
us. . . .
Were you able personally to choose the
titles you obtained through the industry?
Yes.
Even today, can you count on willing cooperation
from all of the studios?
Yes . . .
What was the reasoning behind forming another
U.S. film archive? The Museum of Modern
Art was in existence then, and the Library of
Congress had begun to require deposit for
copyright in 1942.
The Library of Congress deposit for copyright
was only on request from the Library of Congress.
They had a committee that met, and they
would only request, I think, something like
twenty pictures a year that the committee would
decide. . . . For years and years we've all had
that comfortable feeling that if a film is copyrighted
there's a print at the Library of Congress.
That just ain't so at all.
Well, you ask why we thought there should
be another archive. This was a very, very
major problem, because Iris Barry 4 had done
her work so well public-relation-wise that in
nearly all quarters everyone felt that every film
of any conceivable importance was perserved
at the Museum of Modern Art. But this wasn't
so at all. The selections of the Museum of
Modern Art were governed by only one criterion,
and that was Iris Barry's taste. If she didn't like
THE CROWD [1928], for example — which she
didn't — no print. And the fact is that these
things weren't at the Library of Congress and
they weren't being preserved at the Museum of
19

Modern Art. This was one of our most difficult
problems, to convince anybody that there was
any reason to save films like THE DOCKS OF
NEW YORK [1928], THE CROWD, THE LAST
OF THE MOHICANS [1921] — so many of those
films that have since become such standardly
accepted, important items. Just imagine: Cecil
B. DeMille's THE CHEAT [1915], for example —
nobody bothering to do anything about that. . . .
Don't you think that, given the urgency of
assembling what was the world's first film
archive, Iris Barry's painstaking insistence on a
very scrutinizing priority was the proper general
approach?
Absolutely. Absolutely. She was in a position
where the whole function of the Museum of
Modern Art was a discriminating one. Under
d'Harnoncourt, 5 who was head for much of her
time there, and under [Alfred Barr] before that,
they had the highest degree of discrimination.
They knew what they wanted; they knew what
20
they thought was excellence in modern art,
and they felt that any kind of exhibition was
tantamount to saying, "We believe that this is
an extraordinary work." And that carried over
into the whole attitude toward the film library
and the collections and exhibitions from the
film library. It was good at that time, because
at that time you had to establish that the film
was a work of art. Almost nobody believed that
then. No other museum at that time would've
admitted that they would give standing room
for motion pictures in their museum. So here
was a prestigious museum that said, "We believe
that film is part of modern art, and we
believe that these films have made a definite
contribution."
So it all filtered through one person, really,
ultimately — through Iris Barry. And the fact
that she was British helped establish that sense
of prestige, because here in the United States
we still haven't even begun to get over our
British orientation, our cultural dependence upon
Mama. So the very fact that this British
expert was coming over and saying that GREED
[1924] is a great American film — I mean, who
was there to contest it? The very fact that it
was a rejected film commercially would seem
to support this point of view, that you had a
film so advanced that nobody even appreciated
that it was art. Since it certainly wasn't commercial,
it had to be something [chuckles]. It
existed, it had to be something — so o.k., it
was art. No — Iris performed an absolutely
necessary function at that time, and I don't
think anybody could have done better. I think
that any of our catholic points of view that
have emerged since wouldn't have been acceptable
at that time at all. And, thank God,
her taste was good. I mean, just because I
don't agree with many facets of it, seeing the
whole picture, her taste was splendid. It was
wonderful, and one is grateful that she did
save the films she did. . . .
So you saw an opportunity to supplement
the collection at the Museum of Modern Art?
At first we considered that it was a supplementary
collection, but we hadn't gone very
far into it and hadn't encountered the suddenlyawakening
academic concern with film before
we realized that it was much more than a
supplement to any other collection and no
single collection could possibly be adequate to
get a really representative basic production of
various countries. No single institution, not
even the government, could do it.
Did you see your task as one of convincing
producers and the public alike that there were
more films worth saving than just those at
MOMA?
Had to be done all over again, yes. I'd say
it took about five years to really establish the
point, and ironically enough, what helped us
to establish it was the fact that the Museum
started borrowing some of these films that we
had saved. The prestige of the Museum of
Modern Art is so pervasive, you see, that even
just showing a film there would imply its importance
to the extent that when they started
borrowing films from us, people thought,
"Well, maybe there is something to this nut's
contention that some of this trivia he's been
collecting is important after all." And we did
have a much easier task at that time . . .

In 1952, a gift from L. Corrin Strong enabled
Eastman House to build nitrate 6 vaults and
begin a preservation program.
That was the first formidable money of any
kind that we got for the film preservation program.
About $30,000 of that $100,000 went to
build the nitrate vaults and the rest was used
for film duplication, but it was used over a
period of years — there was no big crash program
to spend it all. I think we worked on the
Strong funds for about two years. ... Of course
the next big breakthrough occurred not until
1972 when Nancy Hanks decided she was
going to help out in this overwhelming problem
of film preservation and started making National
Endowment Fund money available. This
was the first time that we were able to really
jump in and start getting things copied. By the
beginning of 1970 we had an enormous collection
of nitrate, and from roughly about '71 or
'72 on, we began to get funding to get it
copied. Until then, it went very slowly. Up until
1970 we were only spending, for years, our
budget of $10,000 for film preservation. I think
we finally got it doubled, up to $20,000, but
that won't get you twenty films any more. . . .
How fast does nitrate deteriorate?
Well, it's like a human being. It depends not
only on the single film but it depends on pieces
within the film. Depends on how the "soup"
was running the day the film was manufactured.
Right now we have in our vaults Lumiere films
that were printed and processed in 1895 or
1897 that are in absolutely perfect condition —
no sign of beginning deterioration. On the
other hand you can run into films that were
made in the forties and fifties that are totally
22
gone. The perfect example is the newsreel of
the opening of Eastman House in November,
1949. The last time we looked at it . . . not
longer than five years ago ... it was in perfectly
good shape. We went to get it out last
week or so, and it's turned absolutely, literally
into powder — there's nothing left of it at all.
. . . And this is another thing you can't anticipate.
It may take fifteen years to deteriorate,
first getting sticky, and then fading a little bit,
and then turning into a viscous — almost a
fluid, and then turning into a powder. Or it
may powder immediately, you just don't know.
This depends on all those unknown factors —
how it was kept, and how it was washed, the
whole chemical composition. So there is no
way — there is no way — of anticipating how
it's going to last, and you can't say that it
can't possibly last beyond fifty years, 'cause
we already have nitrate film in perfect condition
that's older than fifty years.
Given that kind of uncertainty as to when
nitrate is going to deteriorate, how do you
establish priorities for judging when to duplicate
things onto safety stock? Do you make it
a point to begin with the oldest films or the
ones that are already beginning to show signs
of deterioration?
No, unfortunately we don't do any of those
things, and we should. Our priorities are dictated
to us by need. We know we're going to
need a certain group of films for teaching, we
know we're going to need a certain group of
films for programs, or we have a film for only
a limited length of time which we have borrowed
for duping; and there's always more to
be done than we have time for. So, what is
needed for the future, I would certainly say,
is a very carefully worked out priority schedule.
We've been doing it on the panic system,
really.
How much would you estimate of the nitrate
material you hold has deteriorated?
Oh, a very small percentage of the entire
amount. I would say we've lost less than one
per cent through deterioration, and even of
things that we haven't copied, I would say it
would be a fraction of one per cent of the
collection.
Any particular things that you especially
regret having lost?
Yes, the Eastman House newsreel, and we
did lose prints of George Arliss [in both]
DISRAELI [1929] and THE MAN WHO PLAYED
GOD [1921]. . . .
How does one deal with decomposed nitrate?
Well, it used to be burned; but, for years, we
usually bury it now. . . .
You mentioned to me the Strong bequest and
also the National Endowment monies which
you've been able to draw on in large amounts
to preserve film. Did you seek any other sources
of income between those two?
Dr. J. Sibley Watson helped us out on several
occasions when our budget was exhausted
and we had very urgent things to be done.
Mary Pickford gave us a donation to copy her
collection that she had at the Library of Congress;
that was restricted just for Mary Pickford
films, of course, but it was a big and
useful thing. And Colleen Moore gave us some
money to duplicate her films. We've had some
money from Lillian Gish. . . . She gave us
$5,000 just for the film preservation program;
there were no strings attached to it.
Generally, then, you've had to rely on just
your departmental budget in order to finance
both new acquisitions and nitrate preservation?
Right, right ... An awful thing — The first
idea was that everything was going to be
copied on 16mm, and when we started out, for
example, we made only a 16mm print of THE
CROWD. Can you imagine that? We sent the
negative back to MGM and that was the end
of it; somebody junked it there. So there was
no chance to go back and make a beautiful
35mm print from the 35mm [negative]. The first
ones we started out on were DOCKS OF NEW
YORK, THE CROWD, and BEN-HUR, and for­

tunately we did DOCKS OF NEW YORK and
BEN-HUR on 35. There was no money at that
time to do THE CROWD, and we hadn't looked
at the film. I knew it was important enough;
I knew it should be done. But it was a saving
job, and things like OUR DANCING DAUGH­
TERS [1928] and THE CROWD were printed on
16. SHANGHAI EXPRESS [1932], fortunately,
we made a 35 on that —
Is that to say that you would either make a
35 or 16, depending on available funds?
Yes, Of course everything should've gone
onto 35 — no question about it.
What about saving negatives? At what point
were you able to do that?
This was another problem, and I forsee it
as an enduring one as you run out of space,
and with all the hue and cry about the danger
of saving nitrate. And that's the whole business
of "copy and destroy." The damned British
Film Institute started that whole business of
making punch-out tests, trying to get a prognosis
on the life of a nitrate film, and for a
long time they would copy their films and then
destroy the original nitrate. Well, this is madness
because you don't know how long that
nitrate is going to last, and as long as it does
last you can still get the best possible print
from the original negative. And the same way
with nitrate release prints — if you start with
a positive and that's all that's left, the negative
having long-since been destroyed, you
make a dupe negative and you don't destroy
that original, because anything that you take
from your dupe negative isn't going to be as
good, isn't going to be as true as that usually
tinted original nitrate print. So they should be
kept, and they should be looked at — they
shouldn't just be kept as master positives that
are put away. They should be screened by
students so that they can still see, as long as
it's in service, what an original release print of
a 1922 film looked like. This is very important.
. . . There are always those lab technicians
who will try to tell you that a really good copy
made from a dupe negative you're not going
to be able to tell [from the original]. That is
nonsense — real nonsense.
Were the nitrate vaults nearly empty at the
time they were opened?
That's right [laughs]. They were so nearly
empty, we had so relatively little film that —
General Solbert was a friend of Nelson Rockefeller
and he had him as his weekend guest.
And he very generously told Nelson Rockefeller,
he said, "You're spending all that
money, with your Museum of Modern Art, in
storage; send all your dead storage to us and
we'll take care of it for you in our nice airconditioned
vaults." And Rockefeller put the
order through: "Send your 'A' collection to
Eastman House." And the Museum people
were exceedingly unhappy about this, but they
did send Edison negatives and all their Biograph
negatives, and a lot of their other negative
material, and a lot of positive prints. And
while we had it, what we could we copied; we
got a good head start on duplicating some of
the Museum's things while they were here in
Rochester. But then ultimately that all went
back to the Museum, of course, as we began
to need the space for the things we were
getting ourselves.
Did that shipment constitute what the Museum
of Modern Art considered its top-priority
material?
There was a little skull-duggery on that. It
was supposed to be their "A" collection, but
Dick Griffith 7 was the curator then, and he was
understandably reluctant to send his best
goodies way up to Rochester. So what he did
was to send those things that they had no way
of printing at that time — the Biograph twohole
negatives, for example: there was just no
way they knew that they could be printed. And
a lot of Selznick productions that they had no
interest in at that time: they'd taken the collection
on, but it wasn't one of a group of the "in"
or important films. And of course it was a
heyday for us. A specific example was [Abram]
Room's BED AND SOFA [1927]. 8 Iris had gotten
the picture, and it was a little bit too
raunchy for the taste of her associates or
something, so we printed it up and were delighted
to have a print of BED AND SOFA. And
many, many other things that they were reluctant
to exhibit, even. We were happy screening
all of this material and printing it as fast as
we could. It was a real happy time for us . . .
So your first association with the Museum of
Modern Art was one of amicable rivalry?
Well, no, not overtly. It was the situation that
brought about this rivalry. In practice we've
worked very, very closely. After all, Beaumont
Newhall had started out his career there, and
the fact that Nelson Rockefeller and General
Solbert, our director, were pretty close friends
made the association of these two institutions
extremely close. And this has persisted, I'm
happy to say, through all the subsequent directorships.
Willard Van Dyke's time 9 was a very
important time for us, too, because Willard Van
Dyke belongs to the whole history of photography
— very much so. His stewardship at the
Museum brought about even closer relationships
than had existed before.
What sort of principles of collecting guided
you as you began to build up an archive?
Very simple. Anything, anything at all that
we could get that we didn't know for certain
was available at the Museum of Modern Art.
We wouldn't refuse anything. Anything that
turned up for sale, if we had money, we'd buy.
Anything that we could borrow to copy we
would try to copy. Didn't turn down anything
that was offered.
There must have been times that you were
forced to turn down things due to lack of
financial resources.
Yes, we would miss some that would be inflated
by the owners or that they wouldn't part
with. But in general, very few things escaped
us that came to our attention. We had the wonderful
assistance over the years of [the late]
John Allen, Sr. He was the best film scout that
I ever encountered. He had enormous connections
among film people all over, not only in
this country. He would get fabulous things in
from mysterious sources in Holland. American,
German, Swedish films with Dutch titles were
crossing his own vaults constantly, and whenever
he would get a nitrate film that he thought
we might be interested in, he'd let us know;
and we got many of our most important things
that way. A very weird thing: Allen offered us
one of the rarest [Thomas H.] Ince films, THE
WRATH OF THE GODS [1914]; it's a fivereeler,
and he offered us four reels one year.
"Gee," I said, "I hate to take an incomplete
film, but this is so important we just can't turn
it down." We took the incomplete version, and
almost five years later, in another collection,
Allen came up with the last reel.
And only the last reel?
Yes, it was the last reel of this very print.
Somewhere it had gotten separated over the
23

years into another collection; and there they
are, happily together now.
So that in itself presents a kind of lesson
in —
Exactly, a lesson in don't turn down anything
you can get.
John Allen was acquiring films by way of
running a stock footage house?
John Allen came from Rochester. He was
by profession a still photographer like his
father before him, but he was a great movie
buff. Had been ever since a kid. And he had
a vast collection built up, which he gave —
the year before I came to Rochester — to the
Library of Congress. Then when I came to
Rochester as a collector, naturally Allen's
interest started all over again. And after a
couple of years he went to New York, and he
took a whole number of different jobs there,
always rebuilding a collection. Ultimately he
wound up as a service, providing stock shots
— specific scenes from all manner of films —
to the networks as television grew and demanded
these things more. He finally found
that he was able to make a very profitable
business out of the stock shot library. So his
nets, out in order to get all this material for
stock shots, were constantly pulling in films
that he knew were of archival interest to us . . .
Did you never actively seek film in any particular
area? Didn't you look more diligently
for certain personalities whom you were personally
attracted to?
Oh, now that's a sneaky question. Now you're
getting into the area of the curatorial preference
and prejudice. Yes, certainly that's true.
I know that the Museum of Modern Art, for
example, had about two of Garbo's films, and
Iris always thought that was quite enough to
represent what she's done. And very early in the
game I thought, "Here's a personality not only
so extraordinary but so influential on her productions."
This is one area that the writers
and the students haven't even begun to tap
(they're so concerned with the importance of
the director), and that is the real superstars
and the degree that they have really directed
the film. In many, many cases the director on
the film working with superstars is exercising
no more initiative or has no more leeway than
the cameraman himself, because the star is so
important that she's really cast the film, has
24

made alterations in the script, has the right of
selection or modification of the costuming —
everything really. And yet, it's a "Clarence
Brown Production"; you know, it's really a
Greta Garbo production. QUEEN CHRISTINA
[1933] is a wonderful example of that. That's
Garbo's film — [Rouben] Mamoulian was just
there as a coordinator — he wasn't a director,
he was a coordinator.
Do you feel that this emphasis on the star
causes many foreign films to be the performer's
own, or is this particularly indigenous to
Hollywood productions?
Oh, no. This is equally true — for example,
Emil Jannings is the only one I knew of who
had this reduced to an actual credit. On his
wonderful film THE BROKEN JUG [1937] 10 he
takes the credit Kunstlerische Oberleitung —
"artistic super-direction, Emil Jannings." And
that really says it — that spells it out perfectly.
And I'm sure that this situation has obtained
in the work of many, many stars. Often,
quite often, surely to the detriment of the film.
I think many of the [Gloria] Swanson films
would've been much more successful had she
not been this enormously strong character.
It takes a super-director himself to stand up
to the kind of taking charge that a star like
Swanson would do on the set. Well, you ask
about personal taste. I really have to confess
there's no other reason for having so many
John Barrymore pictures in the collection other
than that I'm just fascinated with him as an
actor.
To some extent any curator is motivated by
some personal tastes.
Of course.
Which would be another reason for some
proliferation of archives. . . .
That's a good reason for change of curators
from time to time, too. . . .
What about national cinemas? Which ones
have interested you particularly over the years?
The collection is especially strong, for example,
in the German and American silent
cinemas.
Well, that again obviously reflects a curator's
early interests. But 1 would say now I think
we ought to have had many, many more Italian
films than we do; I think this is exceedingly
important. As a matter of fact, in retrospect, I
would think that the contributions of the Italian
cinema probably overshadow that of the Germans
in an overall view. . . . And the whole
Scandinavian contribution has not been explored
the way it should be. ... I would go so
far to say — well, I've said it many times before
— that you compare the Danish films of a comparable
period to D. W. Griffith and there's just
no contest. Their sophistication, their dramatic
integrity was infinitely superior to Griffith. More
and more I look at Griffith as a very peculiar
caricaturist; I think we've been really, really
led astray in tending to see the Griffith films
as the finest indicators of the American film
of a certain period, because they are really
unique — they belong just to him. They're not
part of the American scene at all; they are part
of the Griffith scene. You can either accept
his kind of film and say it's great, it's wonderful,
or you can — as I personally do — increasingly
reject it. It has nothing to do with the
pattern of American films; it's so totally apart
from the mainstream. ...
You've mentioned the Italian cinema as an
area which is under-represented. I wonder
about some other apparent gaps in the collection,
like the Soviet silent films, avant-garde
films, documentaries, or animated film.
I'm not too concerned about so-called "avantgarde"
films. These are the things that are
really assiduously collected by special interest
groups. I don't admit of the existence of a real
experimental film, because every film that's
made is an experimental film. There are only
films that are completely successful or partly
successful. The idea of having a film that falls
so short of any kind of success within itself and
then calling it experimental is kind of a copout.
... I absolutely refuse to make a distinction
of a so-called documentary film. This is
one of my favorite soapboxes, incidentally. . . .
A so-called documentary is a creative propaganda
film, just as carefully constructed as an
entertainment film; they're creative works. . . .
Maybe the biggest hole is in Latin-American
film. . . . We need many more Japanese silent
films. ... I would say that these are holes
that should be filled up before we go into the
luxury of getting highly specialized kinds of material
like animation. It certainly belongs, in my
opinion, much more to graphic art than it does
to cinema. . . . We must get after some of
these non-represented national cinemas. I think
there needs to be a lot of work done especially
in the pre-Soviet cinema, the Czarist cinema.
It's really been glossed over in the excitement
of what the revolutionist cinema was doing in
Russia.
What about the omission of more contemporary
milestones such as the French New Wave,
or recent films in general?
This has been a matter of simple economic
priorities. There are many of them that one
ought to have as long as teaching is being
done on the premises. But when it gets to be
a question of how you are going to spend
money — on contemporary film that's on acetate
and presumably is going to last for a
couple decades without any difficulty, or on
the preservation of nitrate prints that are absolutely
doomed to disintegrate — one just doesn't
hesitate: the money goes to keep the nitrate.
. . .
Do you think the silent cinema is a different
medium from sound films?
No, I don't at all. I think every single element
of so-called silent film is still operative in
cinema today with just the added dimension of
dialogue. You don't have to use dialogue just
because it's available all throughout a picture,
and some of our finest pictures now have great,
beautiful stretches of non-dialogue in them —
sometimes their most effective moments. There
is, of course, a kind of theory that, in art, a
limitation is a strength. And insofar as the
non-dialogue film had this limitation to overcome,
it was spurred to build up areas of
strength — the area of pantomime for example
— which were immediately weakened when
that limitation was removed. But I think the
overall gain of enlarging the possibilities of
cinema through the use of dialogue and creative
sound outweighed the loss. Some beautiful
things happened when films were restricted
to totally visual presentation; on the
other hand some very grotesque things resulted
from the limitation as well. . . .
Did you see yourself in the early days as a
kind of fighter for the cause of preservation?
Not at all. It was all just inadvertent, trying
to make day-to-day progress. There was no
sense of dedication at all [laughs]. Any fighting
simply involved this sort of thing: we've
been offered a print of INTOLERANCE [1916],
there isn't money to buy it, and we can't let
25

this get away, do something about it. . . .
How large would you estimate the collection
at present?
Well, I think we have close to five thousand
listed titles, last I heard of the computer
count. 11
How were you ever able to build a collection
that large basically on an acquisition
budget of $10,000 to $20,000 annually? Were
a lot of titles donations?
Yes, yes, there've been a large number of
donations. ... I don't know, it is hard to figure
out now — it really is. ... I guess the
answer is that a very large portion of that
five thousand is made up by one- and two-reel
subjects. You have a lot of titles but not such
a vast amount of footage as that would indicate.
What do you consider the greatest collections
that were acquired by Eastman House?
A large number of things has come from was solicited — we searched it out in the
lections of primitive films. . . . The Spoor 12 THIEF of 1920.
Bill Pence and Janus Films; he was one of the
directors of the company. But the [Cecil B.]
DeMille estate collection is probably the most
important single group of films that we got all
hope that there might be some films from the
old Essanay Studios kicking around. We got
the Marks collection on a tip from somebody
who was vacationing up in the Canadian north
in a body. And a floodgate of film was opened woods and saw an abandoned automobile
to us from the MGM vaults [primarily original crammed full with nitrate film. We went up
negatives]. We still haven't even begun to assort
there and purchased these films from the
that out. Certainly in sheer volume the
MGM gifts and loans and total generosity has
been really overwhelming. . . . Especially as
it became more urgent for them to get rid of
their nitrate, they really started sending it to
us faster than we could do anything about
it. . . .
What about other assorted ones like the
Dean, Brewer, Spoor, and Marks collections?
owner. This was an old man already, and his
father had been a pioneer showman. They had
had all the film in a barn somewhere, but the
mice had gotten into it, and they just moved
it out into a field and filled a derelict car up
with the film that had been spared from the
mice. And it turned out to be a whole collection
of incunabula, some very early things. I
guess it went all the way from about 1904
They were exceedingly important for col­
to 1920 — the last film in there was STOP
How much material came to you from foreign
archives?
I would say a very respectable amount.
We kept up programs of exchanges with the
Danish Film Museum in particular, with the
Cinematheque Francaise, with the Yugoslav
Archive, with the Czech Archive. We exchanged
some films with the Russian Archive, and more
recently with the British Film Archive. Over
the years we've kept up a kind of a lively exchange
with those places. . . . We got a lot
of French films from Henri Langlois 13 of the
Cinematheque Francaise, that had never been
released here, or if they had they were
long-since lost. We sketched in areas that our
American film scholars just hadn't investigated
at all. For a long time the work of [Marcel]
I'Herbier was known only from the one film
that the Museum of Modern Art circulated,
and we have many, many of his films here now.
And we have gotten fugitive American films in
great abundance from the Czech Film Archive
— they were rich in American silents, and from
them we made some really startling discoveries.
The whole discovery of John Collins is a perfect
example. We probably never would have
realized his ability had we not looked at BLUE
JEANS [1917], which came to us from Czechoslovakia.
(Even though I had a print of his
COSSACK WHIP [1916] in my own collection
but had never even looked at it until after having
seen BLUE JEANS.)
A wonderful thing was that Langlois sent us
26

the original negative of the Tourneur-Clarence
Brown LAST OF THE MOHICANS, and we were
able to take from that a print that turned out
to be one of the most beautiful prints in the
collection. The whole film is so exquisitely
done pictorially; you can see Tourneur and
Brown just destroying themselves to get these
magnificently framed shots. . . .
Tell me about some of the non-film aspects
of the collection like film stills and equipment.
The apparatus section of the collection is
kind of an orphan child of recent years, which
is rather tragic, I think, because thanks to the
Cromer collection 14 we have a larger, more
significant group here of the real incunabula of
motion pictures than anywhere else in the
country, including the Smithsonian. At one time
almost the whole second floor was devoted to
exhibits of this material, which is now languishing
down in the cellar vaults. Originally I think
too much emphasis was placed on exhibiting
the apparatus; it seems to me much more important
to consider the material that comes
out of those tools than the efficacy of the tool
itself. Nevertheless, there are those who are
interested in the engineering aspects of motion
pictures, and they should be made aware at
least that this material is here for their study
if it becomes important to them. I think we've
kept that pretty much in the dark. I would
suppose that eventually the problem could be
solved by having a really well-done and exhaustive
catalogue with photographs of the
pieces and descriptions of their various unique
aspects.
And film stills?
Yes, the still collection is really an enormous
one, thanks primarily to two factors. At one
time we purchased from Jay Culver of Culver
Pictures Service what he considered to be his
inactive collection of stills for which he didn't
have much call in his service. This is a vast
amount of material. Much of it had been part of
the Motion Picture magazine collection that apparently
he'd acquired from them sometime in
the past. But the really monstrous deposit of
motion picture stills came from Warner Brothers
when they decided to move their head office
out of New York City to the West Coast and
sent to us all of their still books that they had
on hand, not only for Warner Brothers productions
but for those of First National as well.
And I think at the time we estimated there
may have been around three million stills in
that collection. In many cases these still books
contain every still that was shot for a given
production — every single one. 15
When you speak of your administration you
often speak in the plural "we." To what extent
are you talking about your own initiative as the
director, or to what extent has it been a collaboration
with other members of your staff?
I think I'd have to say that I was using the
editorial "we." The first director of Eastman
House, General Solbert, was absolutely fantastic
in his support of getting a motion picture
program under way, and except for his help
and the enormous help I got from General
Curtis it really was my responsibility. In 1953,
George Pratt came and has been an enormously
valued assistant for many, many years thereafter.
And from George's appearance here in
'53 it was a genuine "we." His unique gifts in
research — and in doggedness in running down
the facts of what happened and when — was of
absolutely unmeasurable value to the whole
operation. I would say that certainly all the
contributions to the motion picture program
were really limited to what George and I could
do.
In programming film series for public exhibition
and delivering spoken introductions to
your audiences, what goals have you sought to
accomplish?
Over the years in the Dryden, as audiences
come into the theatre, the thing that I've consistently
tried to do is to get them to see the
film whether it's good or bad, old or new, as a
creative work. And to have a certain amount
of respect for the enormous achievement that
a completed film represents. . . . The fact is
that nowhere else, really, when you go to see a
movie, are you going to get somebody to talk
about it. But I think it's exceedingly important
that this has been done here, because there
has to be a difference established between a
commercial theatre and an institution presenting
a film as part of the history of that medium.
Sometimes, I must say, my remarks have been
only a very token gesture to establish that difference
and nothing else. When I get up there
and there's a film I haven't even seen before,
what am I going to say about it? In many,
many cases what I have to say about it is so
irrelevant it can't be particularly helpful in a
pedagogical way at all, but it does establish
— I hope — that different atmosphere. . . .
Incidentally, this is very important in building
this kind of an audience: our willingness,
our eagerness to show films of which no one
has ever heard, and to show silent films at a
time when they've been almost forgotten.
These are the things that have separated the
archival-institutional showings from any commercial
house. . . . Film is an enduringly popular
medium, and of course it makes anybody
happier to have a full house than to play to
fifteen or twenty people, but I think that one
shouldn't, in the euphoria of having the acceptance
of a larger audience, start to tailor your
activity or your programs to that knowledge.
There's always pressure on an institution, you
know: "Attendance! Attendance!" This is the
big, big thing for an institution, but this is a
really dangerous thing, because that isn't what
the institution should be about. It should be a
place where people who are interested in
specific areas of this museum's stock and trade
can come to see them, regardless of whether
there are twenty-five or two hundred others
like you. You should be able to come there to
see these films that you can't see anywhere
else. . . .
You have often been compared to the late
Henri Langlois, co-founder of the Cinematheque
Francaise. You would have started collecting
roughly the same time —
Exactly the same time, and CALIGARI was
the first feature film both of us collected. We're
just about the same age; he was a few months
older than I, I guess. Well, Dick Griffith kind of
summed it up at one time. He said, "Card and
Langlois aren't film historians at all — they're
film fans." [Laughs heartily.] I guess I'd go along
with that; it's true in many respects. I think as
a historian Henri actually knew a lot more
[than people realized] about the past of the
film. He was certainly not a formal historian in
the way that he ever wrote any documented
articles . . . but he was a brilliant, brilliant
mind and he carried around in his head a
fantastic store of information.
What similarities or differences do you see
between yourself and Langlois?
Well, the big difference is that for the last
fifteen years Henri had been so busy wheeling

and dealing and running around that he never
— I won't say "never" — he hardly ever looked
at a movie. Almost the only time that Henri sat
down and looked at a film in these last years
was when he came to Rochester and we would
plunk him down in the Dryden Theatre. Out of
politesse, he couldn't move away, he couldn't
go to see anybody or greet anybody; he would
look at a whole film. I think he saw more films
here than anywhere else 'cause he was just
absolutely into everything trying to get films,
get films, get films! And arrange to bring people
there to the Cinematheque to do hommages.
But look at films? — No. Almost never. And
that's the big difference with me. I'll look at a
film if I've seen it twenty times. I'm still looking
at it over and over if it's a film I like. I
can't see it too often. I think I've seen CALI­
GARI at least three or four hundred times over
the years, and I have never once seen it —
not once — without finding something in it I
didn't see before. . . . Just fabulous the things
that are in that film. . . .
But again with Langlois — his lack of records-keeping
and many of the indiscriminate —
The thing is though, Henri was chaotic and
he was bad, but I swear, what other outfit in
France has the right to chide him for this? This
is French, as opposed to the way it is in Germany.
That's what Henri always says: "Order?
J'aime le desordre. L'ordre, c'est pour les Allemands."
16 [Long laughter.]
That may have been a reason for the French
not to cast the first stone, but what about some
of the problems with Langlois? He's often been
characterized as one who believed so fervently
in the beauty of nitrate film that he would go
to lengths, almost, not to dupe it onto acetate.
I don't believe that — that's nonsense. It's
true Henri was a mystic, and he ran the whole
Cinematheque on the basis of mysticism. He
really did believe that it was important for the
health of a film to be shown; but you know the
business about his saving film is really kind of
ridiculous, because he dramatized the need to
save film but he wasn't a great film savior.
Probably more film has been lost and even
destroyed, just literally destroyed, through the
Cinematheque Francaise than all the other
archives put together. And some tremendous
things have been lost. I can see that his
detractors will build up a vast scandal out of
28

it; some really irreplaceable things like Stroheim's
THE WEDDING OF THE PRINCE
[1928]. 17 And everybody felt sorry for him at
the time of this disastrous fire, but they
haven't learned anything from it. You go there
today and films are piled in the same corridor
in the same way, stacked up twenty-five feet
high in the sunshine there. Another equally
disastrous fire could happen tomorrow. So
there is no real, real preservation program
that's under way at the Cinematheque. . . . It's
outrageous, and it's too bad, and the films
should be sorted out, and they should be taken
care of the way the Germans would take care
of them, they really should. It's too bad, but
you can't fault Langlois for all that. His big
function was to dramatize it, to get it going —
let the functionaries take over what's still salvageable.
In a certain sense, this is comparable here
[at Eastman House] — our whole preservation
program has never been plotted out with great
care, and things haven't been done on a regular,
thoughtful basis. It's been wrong to allow
the responsibility for acquisition and for duplication
to rest with one person whose taste is
certainly fallible. Luckily this one person could
be said almost to have no tastes, so at least
it's a broad, broad, broad base of the material
that has been saved and has been duplicated.
Speaking of yourself, here.
Yes. But, you know, I think in a general
way, those of us who were pioneers really
served our purpose in getting everybody upset
about this problem and moving people to
do something about it. And now it's the time
to consolidate what has been brought together
and save it on a very, very careful plan and
good, reasonable, unemotional basis. Then
when the next generations come on, it will be
up to them to analyze and really make use of
it. So each group seems ultimately to have its
own function.
And there are waves of —
There are waves of concern, but the big
awful thing is the trouble with the functionary.
They get to the point where they're more happy
with their file cards than they are with the thing
in itself. And they're the ones, as they run out
of space who'll say, "Well, get rid of the
nitrate — it's dangerous, it's taking up space."
And this is really a tragic decision to make,
because the nitrate originals should be used
when they're negatives to get the best possible
prints; the original positives should be looked
at as long as they can be put through projectors.
Otherwise you're not talking about
films, you're talking about facsimiles.
Langlois had a reputation for cutting out
portions of a film that were deteriorating in
order to preserve the rest, thereby necessarily
abridging a film.
I don't know that he ever did that before he
duplicated anything. I doubt that very much.
For one thing, I don't think for years and
years Henri ever held film in his hands, and
the idea of him sitting down at some rewinds
and going through a film is an incredible idea
for me. I've known him since 1953 intimately,
and during that period I never saw him touch
a piece of film, much less all this business
about going through and cutting out titles and
all this nonsense. ... I can't believe that he
would ever deliberately cut any titles out of a
film. I just don't believe that. . . .
I think the one thing that we have overwhelmingly
in common is a total love for film.
Neither one of us is an administrator — or was
an administrator. The title "archivist" is probably
a misnomer; we both started out as collectors.
But we are total lovers of the medium
of film, and it just so happened that these
institutions kind of grew up around us and
were begging for a kind of enlightened administration
that wouldn't constantly do things to
destroy something that should be treated with
love. This sounds sappy, I know, but maybe
the classic example of the super organization
— even beyond any German organization — is
the National Film Archive in London, where
there was no way to see an original print. . . .
[Nitrate] originals were destroyed, including
one of our originals, incidentally. It was an
infuriating thing: OLD HEIDELBERG [1915],
Stroheim's first assistant directorial job, a
beautiful original release print destroyed without
asking us simply because it was nitrate
and they had copied it — also without our
permission. . . .
So, oh, I know they're just going to discover
terrible, terrible things about Langlois — and
he was exasperating, there's no question about
it. But I guess we had better relations with the
Cinematheque than with any other institution —
at least, closer relations. . . .
Do you have any particular worries about the
museum after your departure?
Well of course. One knows, "Apres moi, le
deluge": the walls are going to fall in. But this
is always the feeling of every individual who
has to convince himself that he's indispensable
in order to function at all. Realistically, I know
that the program is going to be different, no
question about that, but I have enormous confidence
in John Kuiper. Insofar as he's given
responsibility to continue this film program, I
know that it's going to be of enormous value
and great success — I'm sure in ways quite
different from those we've experienced in the
time that I've been here. Probably I would say
his contributions are going to be even more
valid in a continuing way. In the show business
field, the pioneer always has to behave in
order to bring attention to the project and to
get it off the ground. There has to be a lot
more of the bravura kind of action than is
called for in a continuing, serious, academic
approach to the study of motion pictures. And
I can't think of anybody who would be better
to pick up that particular thread [than John
Kuiper]. . . .
There must have been items through the
years that you were so fond of that you never
sold to the museum. Do you still have a collection
that you value highly?
I have a very, very small collection of
things that have come to me quite inadvertently.
No, from the point that I sold my
own collection to the museum — I held absolutely
nothing back — I was stripped down to
nothing but my own family films and some that
I had made myself. It's true that over the years
since that time I've been presented with an occasional
thing but nothing that I could really
call a collection — maybe fifty films. Some of
my great personal favorites — I have a print I
cherish of Conrad Veidt in DARK JOURNEY
[1937], for example, and I have a film that
Kevin Brownlow 18 gave me called HOW MOLLY
MALONE WON HER POST, or something like
that, with fabulous personalities of the theatre
in it. I look forward to the future, and I'm sure
I'm going to build up another collection.
You still have none of the same films that
you started out with?
No, alas no.
29

Have you only kept 16mm copies that you're
able to view yourself, or do you still have the
same notion about taking anything that is
offered?
Well, I'm certainly going to take anything I
can get my hands on from now on, but all I
have at the present time are 16mm.
Have you had other dealings with other
collectors during the years?
There are two that I have had dealings with
who have, as far as I know, the best private
collections in the United States — maybe the
world. One runs a theatre in Hollywood. He
won't admit to having a collection of his own;
if you ask him, it's always a film that his friend
has. But the really big, big collector and everybody's
friend in the field is Bill Everson. He
lent us ninety per cent of the films that we
needed for our British series, for example. I
don't think we've ever done a series when we
haven't availed ourselves of his generosity in
lending prints. He's fantastic! I'm going to try
to persuade him to become a museum and
make me its director [laughs heartily].
What other, specific plans do you have for
the future?
Write. To get on paper some of these questions
that I've been speculating about for so
long. And I hope to be able to serve as a
kind of general consultant to other archives
and institutions and become involved in festivals
wherever and whenever I can, just to
keep my nose into film.
Notes
1 J. S. Watson, Jr.'s two-reel film, one of the earliest
examples of the American avant-garde, was shot in
Rochester, New York.
2 THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920), directed by
Robert Wiene, appeared in the United States in 1921 and
introduced American audiences to German expressionism.
3 RAMPER, DER TIERMENSCH, directed by Max Reichmann,
premiered in Berlin in 1927 and was released by
First National in the United States the following year.
4 Iris Barry (1895-1969) founded the film archive at the
Museum of Modern Art in 1935 and served as its first
curator until 1951.
5 Rene d'Harnoncourt became the director of the Museum
of Modern Art in 1943, succeeding Alfred H. Barr, Jr.,
who had directed the museum since its founding in 1929.
6 Before 1951, virtually all 35mm motion pictures were
manufactured on a nitro-cellulose (nitrate) base which is
inflammable, chemically unstable, and doomed to eventual
disintegration. If they are to be preserved, therefore, films
printed on nitrate stock must be duplicated onto more
stable acetate, or safety, stock, which will prolong the
life of a print indefinitely.
7 Richard Griffith was curator of films at the Museum of
Modern Art from 1951 to 1965 and wrote several books
on film.
30
8 The great Soviet silent, a domestic comedy with feminist
sympathies, frankly depicts a sexual triangle and contemplated
abortion.
9 Van Dyke directed the Museum of Modern Art Department
of Film from 1965 to 1974.
10 DER ZERBROCHENE KRUG, produced by Tobis in 1937,
credits Gustav Ucicky as director.
11 Other estimates size the collection as high as ten
thousand.
12 George K. Spoor and his partner G. M. ("Broncho
Billy") Anderson began the Essanay Film Manufacturing
Company in Chicago in 1907.
13 Henri Langlois founded the Cinematheque Francaise
with Georges Franju in 1936 and remained its autocratic
head until his death in January of this year.
14 Gabriel Cromer's outstanding photographic collection
had been purchased in France by Eastman Kodak in 1939;
it became one of the foundations of the museum when
George Eastman House was established.
15 The basis of the stills archive is the Theodore Huff
Collection, donated in his memory by his mother, Mrs.
Marrianne R. Huff, following Huff's untimely death in 1953.
16 "Order? I like disorder. Order's for the Germans."
17 Part Two of Stroheim's THE WEDDING MARCH, never
released domestically, was shown in Europe under the title
THE HONEYMOON or MARIAGE DE PRINCE. The only
known copy of this part perished in a fire at the cinematheque
Francaise.
18 British film historian and filmmaker Kevin Brownlow is
the author of The Parade's Gone By (1968; currently available
in a University of California reprint).
Mr. Reynolds wishes to express special thanks to Kathleen
MacRae and particularly to the editor for their patient
assistance in the preparation of this interview.
The Films of James Card
FOREST SHADOWS (1938)
BERLIN AND DANZIG (1939), surviving fragment from proposed
THERE WAS A CITY
YOUTH DEMOCRACY NYA (1941), National Youth Administration
CAIN PARK THEATRE (1941), National Youth Administration
BLACK GLOVES (1941)
ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL (1944), U.S. Army Photo
Service
TRIPLE EXPOSURE (1947), Informational Films, Eastman
Kodak Company
DAGUERREOTYPE LIKENESSES (1949), George Eastman
House
THE WET COLLODION PROCESS (1949), George Eastman
House
NEGATIVES ON PAPER (1949), George Eastman House
Articles by James
Card
"The German Film Today." National Board of Review
Magazine, vol 11, no. 6 (1936), pp. 5-6, 8.
"Problems of Film History." Hollywood Quarterly, vol. 4,
no. 3 (1950), pp. 279-88.
[Unsigned.] "The Favorite Film Stories." Image, vol. 1,
no. 1 (1952), pp. 2-3.
[Unsigned.] "John Ford's Big Brother." Image, vol. 1, no.
2 (1952), p. 3.
[Unsigned.] "The Tragedy of FAUST." Image, vol. 1, no. 5
(1952), p. 4.
[Unsigned.] "The Autobiography of Emil Jannings." Image,
vol. 1, no. 6 (1952), p. 4.
[Unsigned.] "Collecting Old Films." Image, vol. 1, no. 7
(1952), p. 4.
[Unsigned.] "Chaplin's LIMELIGHT." Image, vol. 1, no. 8
(1952), p. 4.
[Unsigned.] "The International Federation of Film Archives."
Image, vol. 1, no. 9 (1952), p. 3.
[Unsigned.] "A Barrymore Gallery." Image, vol. 2, nos. 1-2
(1953), p. 8.
[Unsigned.] "The Demoniac Screen." Image, vol. 2, no. 3
(1953), pp. 14-15.
[Unsigned.] "Vachel Lindsay on Film." Image, vol. 2, no.
4 (1953), pp. 23-24.
[Unsigned.] "Theodore Huff." Image, vol. 2, no. 4 (1953),
p. 24.
[Unsigned.] "Storage of Nitrate Films." Image, vol. 2, no.
5 (1953), pp. 27-28.
[Unsigned.] "New Books: The World of Robert Flaherty."
Image, vol. 2, no. 5 (1953), pp. 30-31.
[Unsigned.] "Pioneer Newsreels." Image, vol. 2, no. 6
(1953), pp. 39-40.
"The Future of the Movies." Journal of the University Film
Producers, vol. 6, no. 1 (1953), pp. 4-8.
"Visit with Carl Th. Dreyer." Image, vol. 2, no. 9 (1953),
p. 61.
[Unsigned.] "Film Directors as Actors." Image, vol. 3, no.
1 (1954), p. 8.
[Unsigned.] "Doomed: A Half Century Film Record of
America's Past." Image, vol. 3, no. 2 (1954), pp. 9-11.
[Unsigned.] "Movies: The Mirror of the Spirit of Our
Times." Image, vol. 3, no. 2 (1954), pp. 11-14.
"From Muybridge to Cinemascope." Image, vol. 3, no. 2
(1954), pp. 15-16.
"Where are the Vampire Films?" Image, vol. 3, no. 4
(1954), pp. 31-32.
[Unsigned.] "CHANDRALEKA: 'An Earthquake of Interest'."
Image, vol. 3, no. 7 (1954), p. 48.
[Unsigned.] "Lionel Barrymore." Image, vol. 3, no. 9
(1954), p. 63.
"REVERON: An Artistic Art Film." Image, vol. 4, no. 1
(1955), p. 8.
[Unsigned.] "THE FIGHTING LADY." Image, vol. 4, no. 2
(1955), p. 16.
[Unsigned.] "The Screen's First Tragedienne: Asta Nielsen."
Image, vol. 4, no. 3 (1955), p. 24.
[Unsigned.] "Sybille Schmitz 1909-1955." Image, vol. 4,
no. 4 (1955), pp. 31-32.
[Unsigned.] "Arne Sucksdorff." Image, vol. 4, no. 5 (1955),
p. 40.
"Perspectives and Prospects of 16mm Film: 16mm Film
in Historical Perspective." Film Culture, vol. 1, no. 3
(1955), pp. 13-14.
[Unsigned.] "The Mystery of Canadian Film Production."
Image, vol. 4, no. 6 (1955), p. 48.
"Silent Film Speed." Image, vol. 4, no. 7 (1955), pp. 55-56.
[Unsigned.] "Festival of Film Artists." Image, vol. 4, no. 8
(1955), pp. 62-63.
"The Film Career of Joan Crawford." Image, vol. 5, no. 1
(1956), pp. 14-15.
"Movies — Which Cuts Do You Prefer?" Image, vol. 5,
no. 2 (1956), pp. 38-39.
"Influences of the Danish Film." Image, vol. 5, no. 3
(1956), pp. 51-57.
"The Films of William S. Hart." Image, vol. 5, no. 3
(1956), p. 60.
"Japanese Film Masterpieces: Producers' Choice." Image,
vol. 5, no. 4 (1956), pp. 84-87.
"Fifth Anniversary: The Dryden Theatre Film Society."
Image, vol. 5, no. 6 (1956), pp. 136-37.
"Out of Pandora's Box: New Light on G. W. Pabst from
his Lost Star, Louise Brooks." Image, vol. 5, no. 7 (1956),
pp. 148-52.
"From Prose to Screen: Program of the 1956-1957 Season
of the Dryden Theatre Film Society." Image, vol. 5, no. 7
(1956), p. 161.
"The George K. Spoor Collection: Motion Picture Film
and Equipment Recently Given to the Museum." Image,
vol. 5, no. 8 (1956), pp. 182-85.
"Cecil B. DeMille: The Greatest Showman on Earth."
Image, vol. 5, no. 9 (1956), pp. 196-201.
"The Mystery of Molteni's Choreutoscope." Image, vol. 5,
no. 10 (1956), pp. 230-32.
"The Unforgotten." Image, vol. 6, no. 2 (1957), p. 27.

"THE THEFT OF THE MONA LISA: A Re-Review." Image,
vol. 6, no. 2 (1957), pp. 39-42.
[Unsigned.] "Index to the Motion Picture Study Collection
[Scenes from RIP VAN WINKLE (1896); L'HOMME DE
TETES (1898); BURNING STABLE (1896)]." Image, vol. 6,
no. 2 (1957), p. 43.
[Unsigned.) "Index to Motion Picture Study Collection
continued [FIRE! (1901); A BIG SWALLOW (1901)]." Image,
vol. 6, no. 3 (1957), p. 72.
[Unsigned.] "Index to the Motion Picture Study Collection
[THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY (Edison, 1903); THE GREAT
TRAIN ROBBERY (Lubin, 1904); LES INVISIBLES (1905)]."
Image, vol. 6, no. 4 (1957), p. 96.
"Gift of the Drydens." Image, vol. 6, no. 5 (1957), p. 103.
[Unsigned.] "Index to Motion Picture Study Collection
[THE ENCHANTED GLASSES (1907); THE BATTLE IN THE
CLOUDS (1909); LE FILS DU DIABLE FAIT LA NOCE EN
PARIS (1906)]." Image, vol. 6, no. 5 (1957), p. 122.
"Shooting Off-the-Set." Image, vol. 6, no. 6 (1957), pp.
135-40.
[Unsigned.] "Index to Motion Picture Study Collection
[A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM (1909); THE RESTORA­
TION (1909); THE BATTLE (1911); DEN SORTE DROM
(1911)]." Image, vol. 6, no. 6 (1957), p. 141.
[Unsigned.] "Index to Motion Picture Study Collection
[THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN (1912); FROM THE MANGER
TO THE CROSS (1912); TIGRIS (1912)]." Image, vol. 6,
no. 7 (1957), p. 171.
"Winners of the Second Festival of Film Artists." Image,
vol. 6, no. 8 (1957), pp. 180-94.
"Two Sound Books for Film Students [reviews of The
Lion's Share and The Liveliest Art]." Image, vol. 6, no. 9
(1957), pp. 221-23.
[Unsigned.] "Index to Motion Picture Study Collection
[THE MARGRAVE'S DAUGHTER (1912); DIE ARME JENNY
(1912); SUENDEN DER VAETER (1912)]." Image, vol. 6,
no. 9 (1957), p. 226.
[Unsigned.] "Index to Motion Picture Collection [THE
COWARD'S ATONEMENT (1913); THE BATTLE AT ELDER­
BUSH GULCH (1914); ATLANTIS (1913)]." Image, vol. 7,
no. 1, (1958), p. 17.
[Unsigned.] "Index to Motion Picture Study Collection
[. . . ROBINSON CRUSOE (1913); MARCANTONIO E
CLEOPATRA (1913)]." Image, vol. 7, no. 2 (1958), p. 41.
[Unsigned.] "Index to Motion Pictures [THE TYPHOON
(1914); THE GANGSTERS AND THE GIRL (1914)]." Image,
vol. 7, no. 3 (1958), p. 65.
"The Movies." Image, vol. 7, no. 3 (1958), pp. 70-71.
"The Intense Isolation of Louise Brooks." Sight And
Sound, Spring-Summer (1958), pp. 240-44.
"Rudolph Valentino." Image, vol. 7, no. 5 (1958), pp.
106-11.
[Unsigned.] "Index to Motion Picture Collection [MADAME
BUTTERFLY (1915); THE PROFESSOR'S ROMANCE (1914);
THE LAMB (1915); BAD BUCK OF SANTA YNEZ (1915); AT
THE OLD CROSSROADS (1914); TESS OF THE STORM
COUNTRY (1914)]." Image, vol. 7, no. 5 (1958), pp. 116-17.
"Film Archives." Image, vol. 7, no. 6 (1958), pp. 137-41.
[Unsigned.] "Index to Motion Picture Collection [OLD
HEIDELBERG (1915); THE BEGGAR OF CAWNPORE (1916);
HOODOO ANN (1916); RAFFLES (1917); THE NARROW
TRAIL (1917)]." Image, vol. 7, no. 7 (1958), pp. 166-67.
[Unsigned.] "Index to Motion Picture Collection [STELLA
MARIS (1918); SHIFTING SANDS (1918); SUNNYSIDE
(1919)]." Image, vol. 7, no. 8 (1958), p. 189.
[Unsigned.] "Index to Motion Picture Collection [THE
LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1920); THE IDLE CLASS (1921]."
Image, vol. 7, no. 9 (1958), p. 211.
"Outstanding Motion Picture Acquisitions of the Year."
Image, vol. 8, no. 1 (1959), pp. 37-46.
"Agee on Film." Image, vol. 8, no. 1 (1959), pp. 53-54.
"The Historical Motion Picture Collection at George
Eastman House." Journal of the Society of Motion Picture
and Television Engineers, vol. 68, no. 3 (1959), pp. 143-46.
"Ingmar Bergman." Image, vol. 8, no. 2 (1959), pp.
106-107.
"Knaurs Buch vom Film." Image, vol. 8, no. 2 (1959),
p. 109.
[Unsigned] "Quarterly Notes from the George Eastman
House [Additions to Film Collection]." Image, vol. 8, no.
3 (1959), p. 168.
"Culture and Commerce." Image, vol. 8, no. 4 (1959),
pp. 170-'1.
"The Films of Mary Pickford." Image, vol. 8, no. 4 (1959),
pp. 172-87.
[Unsigned.] "International Federation of Film Archives."
Image, vol. 8, no. 4 (1959), p. 223.
[Unsigned.] "First Garbo Films." Image, vol. 9, no. 1
(1960), p. 56.
"Arcana from East and West: Recent Additions to the
Motion Picture Study Collection." Image, vol. 9, no. 2
(1960), pp. 78-91.
[Unsigned.] "Dryden Theatre Tenth Anniversary Film
Series." Image, vol. 9, no. 2 (1960), p. 104.
[Unsigned.] "Tribute to Pola Negri." Image, vol. 9, no. 2
(1960), p. 104.
"The Japanese Film: Art and Industry and Kino: A History
of the Russian and Soviet Film [book reviews]."
Image, vol. 10, no. 2 (1961), pp. 6-7.
[Unsigned.] "Eastman House in Paris." Image, vol. 10,
no. 5 (1961), p. 20.
[Unsigned.] "The Cinematheque Francaise and the
George Eastman House at the Chaillot Palace." Image,
vol. 12, no. 2 (1963), p. 7.
[Unsigned.] "The Fourth Festival of Latin-American Films."
Image, vol. 12, no. 2 (1963), p. 7.
"History of Motion Pictures." In The Encyclopedia of
Photography, edited by Willard D. Morgan, vol. 9, pp.
1717-28. New York: Greystone Press, 1963.
[Unsigned.] "The Motion Picture Study Collection: Recent
Acquisitions." Image, vol. 12, no. 6 (1964), pp. 22-23.
"The Silent Films of Cecil B. DeMille." Image, vol. 14,
nos. 5-6 (1971), pp. 6-7.
"In Memoriam: Henri Langlois." Film Comment, vol. 13,
no. 2 (1977), p. 33.
31

Influential Image: Edward Steichen's J. P. Morgan
Robert McCracken
Peck
Edward Steichen's famous 1903 portrait of
John Pierpont Morgan has long been considered
one of Steichen's greatest photographic
achievements. It has become so closely associated
with Morgan's personality as to be almost
synonymous with his name. Less well
known are the half dozen related works in
other media, and a second Steichen photograph
of Morgan which was exhibited publicly
for the first time in 1974. The full story of the
relationship between these portraits has only
recently come to light. It is as complex and
fascinating as the lives of the men involved.
Steichen's involvement with Morgan began
in a most unassuming way in 1903 as the result
of a conversation between the German
artist Fedor Encke (1851-1926) and his close
personal friend Alfred Stieglitz. Disappointed
by the slow progress of a portrait he was
painting of Morgan, and frustrated by the
brevity of his subject's sittings, Encke asked
Stieglitz to suggest the name of a photographer
who might assist him in capturing the
features of his all too restive sitter. The request
was a common one for the time. Many
society and celebrity portraits were executed
with the aid of photographs. Stieglitz gave the
artist the name of Edward Steichen, a member
of his Photo-Secession group. It was to be one
of Steichen's most important portrait assignments.
Steichen agreed to perform the favor requested
by Encke with the agreement that, in
addition to the photograph taken for Encke,
he would be permitted to create a portrait
study of his own. The two exposures were
made in Encke's studio in less than three
minutes. Having rehearsed most of the morning
with the building's janitor, the photographer
was ready for Morgan when the financier ar­
32

ived. Steichen described the event as "one of
my most exciting experiences in portraiture." 1
While Morgan bought several copies of the
formal portrait taken for Encke, he described
Steichen's own as "terrible," and tore a print
of it to pieces when the photographer brought
both to him a few weeks after they had been
taken. 2 Ironically, it was Steichen's own photograph
and not the more pedestrian first exposure
which was to achieve lasting fame.
Distributed to family members, the dozen
acceptable prints purchased by Morgan were
never publicly exhibited, and — until two years
ago — it was thought that all had been lost or
destroyed. Since the photograph had never
been published, photographic historians have
had to rely on Steichen's own reminiscences
for evidence that such a photograph had been
made. In the spring of 1974, however, one of
Steichen's original prints was discovered in
the collection of the Morgan Library and publicly
exhibited for the first time at the Princeton
University Art Museum. 3 Technically superb,
4 the photograph shows a bold and selfassured
Morgan. It is a head and shoulder
portrait recording Morgan's physical features,
but little of his personality. The pose, determined
by Encke to facilitate its use in the oil
portrait, lacks the vital dynamism of the second
photograph made without the painter's interference.
In the latter, Steichen's psychology in
posing the sitter gives a crucial added dimension
to the photograph, while his skillful lighting
and slightly different camera angle combine
to give the work unprecedented strength.
In addition to the striking compositional and
technical qualities of the photograph, there was
one detail that further increased the portrait's
notoriety: the play of light on the arm of the
banker's chair caused it to resemble the blade
of a knife—reflective, some thought, of the
financier's ruthless character. 5 When a gravure
print of the photograph appeared in a special
1906 "Steichen Supplement" of Alfred Steiglitz's
Camera Work, it caused an instant sensation
and helped to launch Steichen on a career
as a notable portrait photographer.
Interestingly enough, Morgan's original assessment
of the photograph was quickly
33

changed when a print of it, on exhibition at
Stieglitz's 291 Gallery, 6 was given wide acclaim
among the avant-garde artistic circles of New
York. Bella da Costa Green, Morgan's librarian
and frequent visitor to the Gallery, convinced
Morgan that he should have a print. Morgan,
who now denied having seen it before, offered
to purchase the work from Stieglitz for $5,000,
but was refused. The financier was told that
the photograph belonged to Steichen and that
to acquire a copy, he would have to contact
the photographer directly. Steichen, not forgetting
Morgan's earlier hostility, waited a full
34
three years before printing a copy for the
banker. This photograph has been on display
at the Morgan Library ever since. 7
The story of Steichen's photograph was not
to end with the Fedor Encke portrait, nor with
Morgan's purchase of the print. Unbeknownst
to Steichen, the picture's publication in Camera
Work was only the beginning of yet another
sequence of events.
In 1909 the Peruvian painter Carlos Baca-
Flor arrived in New York from Europe. Popular
in American social circles in Paris, Baca-Flor
had met with some success as a portraitist.
Morgan had heard of the artist's work from
friends, and commissioned a portrait from the
Peruvian upon his arrival. 8 Morgan's time was
valuable, however, and like Encke, Baca-Flor
found sittings difficult to arrange. That he
might finish the portrait in a reasonable length
of time, the artist was forced to turn, at least
in part, to photographs of the sitter. It is not
surprising that one of the photographs he chose
was Steichen's, published in Camera Work
three years before. 9 Whether Morgan also provided
the artist with a copy of the "Encke
photograph" is not known.
What appears to be a preliminary sketch for
the portrait, now in the collection of the Museo
de Arte de Lima, Peru and about which little
documentary information is available, 10 is noticeably
looser than the final portrait and suggests
that it may have been drawn from life.

By contrast, the final portrait, completed in
1910, is stiff and lifeless. 11 It undoubtedly reflects
the extent to which Baca-Flor was forced
to rely on Steichen's photograph.
Using the head and shoulders and some of
the details of Steichen's portrait, Baca-Flor has
altered the arms to create a conventional,
academic prose with the financier standing beside
a table. Morgan's piercing look and vital,
aggressive pose are lost, and with them the
immediacy and drama of the work.
The flattering features and stale but stately
pose in the portrait must have appealed to
Morgan however. He presented the oil to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art — where he had
served as a trustee since 1888 and as president
since 1904 — in the year of the portrait's
completion. Unfortunately, the artist had used
a tar-based substance called bitumen in his
work, and the painting failed to dry properly.
By 1914, a year after Morgan's death, all attempts
to maintain the original condition of the
painting had failed and it was returned to
Baca-Flor for retouching and restoration. 12
While in the possession of his own original,
Baca-Flor made at least four copies of the
portrait. The one made for the Morgan family
in 1911 is probably the best known. It is this
painting which was donated to the Metropolitan
by the family in 19.39 to replace the first portrait
which, still wet and running almost thirty
years after its completion, had to be destroyed
at that time. 13 While similar to the original in
many ways, this version of the portrait reflects
some compositional alterations. The chair to
Morgan's left — which played so important a
part in Steichen's photograph — has been
eliminated. Morgan's hand has been taken out
of his pocket, and several of the books on
which he leans have been removed.
Another 1911 copy, now in the possession of
the Morgan Guaranty Trust in New York, 14 uses
aspects from both of these compositions and
may, in fact, have served as a transitional work
between the two. 15 In it the background of the
original work is maintained, but the hand has
been removed from the pocket as in the family
copy.
Another factor which suggests that the
Trust's copy may have been first, is a general
progression of detail. While the Trust's copy
maintains the original composition intact, the
family's version directs more attention to the
subject by subordinating all but essential details.
A third copy, painted in 1915, continues
this trend by eliminating the background details
all together. 16 Ironically, this bust portrait
35

comes closest to the photograph taken by
Steichen twelve years before. 17
Whether or not Baca-Flor was aware of completing
the circle, the final work cannot help
but bring to mind the strength of Steichen's
original conception. Even when putting aside
the distractions of external accouterments of
wealth and position (the beautifully bound
books, the rich clothes, etc.), Baca-Flor has
36
failed to capture the essence of the man within.
The painter's limitations reveal by contrast the
photographer's strength.
Edward Steichen, in a medium still criticized
for its mechanical superficiality, successfully
penetrated the surface of his sitter's facade. In
three minutes, he was able to capture the
illusive spirit that was the strength of J. P.
Morgan.
Notes
1 Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography, New York:
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1963, Chapter 3. — n. p.
2 Ibid.
3 The exhibition, "Copies as Originals; Translations in
Media and Techniques," Princeton University Art Museum
May 31-June 30, 1974, grew out of a museum internship
program offered to members of the Department of Art
and Archeology. The findings presented here were first
published in the exhibition catalog Copies as Originals,
The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1974. I would like
to thank the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Morgan
Guaranty Trust, and the members of the Morgan family
for their generous assistance. I would also like to thank
Professor Peter Bunnell, Princeton University, for his
advice and encouragement throughout.
4 Although the surviving print has suffered some physical
abuse (it is badly creased), it is clear that the original
photograph exhibited the technical excellence for which
Steichen is renowned.
5 Steichen never explained whether or not this had been
his intention; See A Life in Photography, Chapter 3.
6 Steichen's exhibition at 291 was held March 9-24, 1906.
7 The print that had been so eagerly sought by Morgan
from the 291 exhibition had been printed with much care
by Steichen while he was in Paris. Immediately after its
exhibition at 291, Steichen presented it to Stieglitz. It is
now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
a gift of Alfred Stieglitz.
8 In the catalog for the important exhibition of "Art of
Latin America since Independence" organized by the
Yale University Art Gallery and the University of Texas
Art Museum, Dr. Stanton Catlin has suggested that
Morgan may have paid Baca-Flor's passage to the United
States so that the artist could complete his portrait —
already begun in Paris. See Catlin and Grieder, Art of
Latin America since Independence, Yale University Press,
1966.
9 This assumption rests on both a visual analysis and
on Steichen's own information as recounted in his Life in
Photography. Van Deren Coke has discussed the relationship
between Steichen and Baca-Flor in The Painter and
the Photograph (University of New Mexico Press, 1964).
In his book, Coke incorrectly asserts that the Steichen
photograph was taken for Baca-Flor. Peter Pollack in
The Picture History of Photography (Harry N. Abrams,
New York, 1958) makes the same error.
10 The sketch, pencil and charcoal on canvas, measures
approximately one meter in length. It was purchased in
Paris in 1955 from the heirs of the artist. I am grateful
to Dr. Francisco Stastny, Director, Museo de Arte y de
Historia, Lima, Peru for his assistance in obtaining information
about the sketch.
11 Aside from the Copies as Originals catalog mentioned
above, the only published reproduction of this painting
is in the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art VIII,
April 1913, where it appeared at the time of Morgan's
death with a tribute to the Museum's late Trustee and
President.
12 Baca-Flor is known to have still had possession of
the portrait in 1918. Although the Metropolitan had possession
of it again by 1931, the Museum records do not
indicate exactly when it was returned.
13 Van Deren Coke, in the publication cited above, failed
to establish that the Baca-Flor painting to which he compares
the Steichen photograph is this 1911 copy and not
the original, since destroyed.
14 Still another copy of the portrait is in the possession
of the Morgan Guaranty Trust, London.
15 The chronology suggested here is based on stylistic
and compositional evidence. It is impossible to determine
what, if any, effect patron preferences may have had on
the portrait copies.
16 This painting is in the Harvard University Portrait
Collection, Gift of F. Baker, Jr., 1931.
17 The similarity of composition between the 1915 oil
and the 1909 charcoal and pencil sketch in the Museo de
Arte collection is also worthy of note, for it reflects Baca-
Flor's attempts at freshening his depiction of the deceased
sitter by consulting all of the original materials
available to him.

International Museum of Photography
at George Eastman House
Office of Extension Activities
900 East Avenue, Rochester, N.Y., 14607
Schedule of Bookings:
June - December 1977
EUGENE ATGET
40 prints — $200/month
Musee d'art contemporain,
Montreal, Canada June 15-July 15
Hackley Art Museum,
Muskegon, Mi. August 1-31
University of Notre Dame,
Notre Dame, In. October 1-31
HARRY CALLAHAN/CITY
50 prints — $250/month
Pentax Gallery, Tokyo, Japan July 15-August 14
Davison Art Center, Wesleyan Univ.,
Middletown, Ct. October 1-31
Brooks Institute of Photography,
Santa Barbara, Ca. November 15-Dec. 12
MARK COHEN
25 prints — $125/month
Oakton Community College,
Morton Grove, II. September 1-30
COMING ATTRACTIONS
50 prints — $250/month
Orange Coast College Library,
Costa Mesa, Ca. November 1-30
CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHERS VI
50 prints — $250/month
University of Oklahoma,
Norman, Ok. July 1-31
Miami Dade Community College,
Miami, Fl. Sept. 1-30
University of North Carolina,
Charlotte, N.C. November 1-30
CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHER VII
24 prints — $125/month
University of Oklahoma,
Norman, Ok. July 1-31
Fine Arts Museum of the South,
Mobile, Al. December 1-31
BRUCE DAVIDSON
25 prints — $125/month
Pentax Gallery, Tokyo, Japan June 15-July 14
Ft. Lauderdale Museum of the Arts,
Ft. Lauderdale, Fl. Sept. 1-30
Midland Center for the Arts,
Midland, Mi. November 1-30
ROBERT DOISNEAU
25 prints — $125/month
ROBERT FRANK
25 prints — $125/month
Pentax Gallery, Tokyo, Japan June 15-July 14
Columbia Gallery of Photography,
Columbia, Mo. August 29-Sept. 24
Stockton State College
Pomona, N.J. November 1-30
FROM THE GEH COLLECTION
99 prints — $500/month
Lafayette College,
Easton, Pa. October 25-Nov. 22
Roswell Museum & Art Center,
Roswell, N.M. December 10-Jan. 8
GARY HALLMAN
20 prints — $125/month
LEWIS HINE
50 prints — $250/month
Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Fine Arts,
Ft. Lauderdale, Fl. September 1-30
Western Carolina University,
Cullowhee, N.C. November 1-31
EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE
35 prints —$175/month
Fine Arts Museum of the South,
Mobile, Al. October 1-31
ARNOLD NEWMAN
50 prints — $250/month
Oakton Community College,
Morton Grove, II. July 1-31
Ft. Lauderdale Museum of the Arts,
Ft. Lauderdale, Fl. September 1-30
West Liberty State College,
West Liberty, W. Va. November 1-30
PHOTO/GRAPHICS
25 prints — $125/month
Boise State University,
Boise, Id. Oct. 24-Nov. 11
EUGENE SMITH
25 prints — $125/month
Honeywell Memorial Community Center,
Wabash, In. June 4-30
Mendocino County Museum,
Willits, Ca. July 22-Sept. 16
Midland Center for the Arts,
Midland, Mi. October 1-31
JOSEF SUDEK
35 prints — $200/month
University of Wisconsin,
Eau Claire, Wi. October 1-19
The Photographers' Gallery,
Saskatoon, Canada Nov. 18-Dec. 17
TERMINAL LANDSCAPE
40 prints — $195/month
Reading Public Museum & Art Gallery,
Reading, Pa. Oct. 1-Nov. 30
CARL TOTH
25 prints — $125/month
Midland Center for the Arts,
Midland, Mi. Sept. 1-30
Boise State University,
Boise, Id. Oct. 24-Nov. 11
TULSA/LARRY CLARK
49 prints — $250/month
Pentax Gallery,
Tokyo, Japan August 15-Sept. 14
University of Wisconsin,
Eau Claire, Wi. October 1-19
JERRY UELSMANN
29 prints — $150/month
Brooks Institute of Photography,
Santa Barbara, Ca. August 1-31
St. John's College,
Annapolis, Md. Sept. 15-Oct. 15
Davison Art Center,
Middleton, Ct. Nov. 1-30
WEST OF THE ROCKIES
25 prints —$125/month
Midland Center for the Arts,
Midland, Mi. Sept. 1-30