Movie Review

This one-hour installment of the PBS series American Experience chronicles the life of George Eastman (1854–1932), the entrepreneur most responsible for popularizing photography in America. The writer-director-producer James A. DeVinney follows the conventions of the PBS video biography: slow camera pans of sepia-tone photographs interspersed with historical footage, interview segments, and tasteful historical reenactments. DeVinney underutilizes Eastman Kodak's rich and revealing advertisements and slips in some generic historical footage but otherwise employs visual materials accurately and judiciously. Because Eastman himself was an early celluloid movie film producer and enthusiast, there is delightful footage of his mansion, parties, camping trips, and African safaris.

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The program features a strong roster of talking heads—historians, curators, family members, and the Eastman biographer Elizabeth Brayer—but the interview segments edited into the show serve almost exclusively to advance the story line rather than to supply context and interpretation. The notable exception is the technology historian John M. Staudenmaier, an engaging on-camera presence who offers some insightful broader observations. The program contrasts Eastman's rigid, controlling, "prickly," and socially "awkward" personality with his role in democratizing and sentimentalizing photography. Staudenmaier emphasizes Eastman's early insight that "you could capture warm, simple, and tender moments and save them." But the photography historian Colin Harding is closer to the mark when he calls this the "legacy" of a man who "was definitely a businessman first and foremost." Photography's new cultural meanings seem to have been an important but unintended consequence of Eastman's commodification strategy.

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