George Eastman Museum is proud to present an exhibition that raises questions about gender identity and dynamics. Often, one’s outward presentation of gender and one’s behavior are interpreted through visual cues. Photographs provide one way to gain insight into how people identify, use, and express ideas about gender.

The Gender Show includes works from the George Eastman Museum collection that investigate the ways in which photographs have engaged notions of gender in a variety of contexts, from conventional to subversive, and brings attention to the way we see and categorize each other and...

In 1999, Pavel Wolberg (Russian, b. 1966) stumbled upon a Hasidic wedding ceremony at an event hall in Israel, where he was living and working as a photojournalist. Stepping through the door, he felt himself transported to another world, one in which revelry and reverence played essential roles. He went on to photograph a number of Hasidic rituals and ceremonies over the next decade, producing vibrant images that suggest the complex dynamic between individual and group identity.

Wolberg recalls that as a child he was fascinated by stories of demons and tales of moral consequence. Echoes of...

Of Time and Buildings considers space, place, and time as expressed photographically both before and since the digital turn. Focusing on simple structures made by humans, the photographs in this exhibition present buildings as fact, metaphor, memory, and memorial.

Drawn from the unparalleled collections of George Eastman House, works from the nineteenth century to the present show how artists, architects, and others have used photography to depict the human environment over time. New ways of image-making made possible by digital technologies are contrasted with the more evidentiary...

David Levinthal’s most recent series, History, is a culmination of his work over the last three-and-a-half decades. Like his previous bodies of work, the best-known of which include Hitler Moves East (1975–77), Modern Romance (1984–86), The Wild West (1987–89), and Barbie (1998–99), History speaks to the way in which popular imagery infiltrates memory, imagination, and identity.

To make his work, Levinthal (American, b. 1949) begins by finding vintage figurines and play sets through his now long-established network of toy sellers and collectors, and then creates elaborate scenes based on...

For forty years, the enormous color transparencies that graced Grand Cen­tral Terminal touched the hearts of mil­lions. Today, they represent not only an appealing and believable idealization of American life, but a nuanced and effective use of photographs to create desire for the products and activities they sold. As a museum of the photo­graph in history and culture, located in the city that Kodak made and made famous, George Eastman House is uniquely equipped to celebrate and explore these innovative and seminal advertisements. 

Now, twenty years after the last Colorama has left Grand...

Photography has captured how humans have used gardens from the 19th century to today. This exhibition intends to expand viewers understanding of how people have cultivated the landscape—from the elaborate backdrop of Versailles to the simplest home vegetable garden plot, from worlds imagined by artists to food production recorded by journalists.

The title of Brian Ulrich’s most recent body of work refers to an urban legend of the 1980s that became a reality in 1999. The legend held that American Express issued, by invitation only, a special charge card to ultra-wealthy individuals, who could use it to purchase anything and everything that they wanted, from private planes to private islands—as long as they did not disclose the existence of the card. The company fielded hundreds of calls from people requesting to be considered for the card. Articles were written claiming that the card truly existed (one such article appeared in the Wall...

Mickalene Thomas: Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman demonstrates the artist’s ongoing engagement with portraiture as a key to personal and cultural identity.

A major feature of the exhibition is the filmHappy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman, a documentary portrait of the artist’s mother, who has served as her muse for the past decade. Interspersed with excerpts from a conversation between the artist and her mother—former fashion model Sandra Bush—are archival film clips, snapshots, and scenes of her mother in her hospital bed as she suffers the effects of the kidney disease that took her life...

Lewis Hine is a major retrospective of this celebrated documentary photographer, reformer, and educator. Featuring more than 150 original prints dating from 1905 to 1937 as well as period publications, posters, and ephemera, the exhibition explores Hine’s use of photography to advance progressive social causes, such as improved housing for the poor, the passage of child labor laws, and humanitarian aid to Europe after World War I. The exhibition includes iconic images depicting workers constructing the Empire State Building as well as previously unexhibited material. The exhibition was curated...