How much time went into putting this exhibit together?
For me it began actively in 2006, two and half years of research at the Norman Rockwell Museum, nine research visits in all over that period. I first discovered the images in 1993 purely by happenstance watching a PBS biography on Rockwell, two or three images flipped by, and it was immediately obvious that they were photos by Rockwell. It was also clear that he had taken so much time to put his style and his personality into these images and they were so close to the painting. It was a major find that I was stunned nobody had researched before.
I didn’t have the time in my career at that point but I would sort of check every 6 months or so and the photos remained untouched territory until 2006 to my amazement. So I then approached the Rockwell family first, who are very forward thinking people, and then I approached the museum. I assumed at first that I would doing this old school and just going through boxes of prints.
So how well organized was the collection?
Tremendously well organized, but here’s the important thing, since I first started researching photos in the 1970’s, all pre-digital of course, I had a certain MO of going through all photos, negatives, etc. of the various projects I’ve worked on. What you have to realize is you can’t approach Rockwell’s images that way because the prints to him were workaday tools. He would cut them up and it can make for a very incomplete record.
By pure coincidence, the Norman Rockwell Museum had gotten a grant to digitize the complete negative archive, and very kindly they let me in to be the first researcher to work on the newly digitized files. So I was the first non-staff set of eyes to go through all 18,000 plus scans, at least three times.
So from seeing the negatives and then going to the prints, or pieces of prints, which did you learn more about his process from?
I realized how you can deconstruct his process, he wouldn’t typically create a painting from a single photograph, he’d pick a face from this one, the feet from that one, hands from another, and he would organize them as a sort of analog Photoshop. So only by going through the series of negatives like that and finding out which element came from which, because prints may no longer exist, could we accomplish things like the montages in the show.
For example, when in one painting, a model appears at least three times, with mustache and then without.
These guys with mustaches were very important to him (laughs) He had one in New Rochelle in fact and convinced him to shave it off so he could pose him as a woman in “The Gossips” and the man’s mustache never grew back and Rockwell felt guilty for the rest of his life (laughs). And then he found a similar mustachioed guy in Arlington, after he left New Rochelle, as props and settings to him were almost as important as the characters themselves. So he then used that fellow twice in the painting once with the mustache and once without and then moved that mustache on to someone else’s face again. And you couldn’t do that without a photograph.
After seeing the exhibit for the first time and hearing other people’s reactions, maybe “surprised’ is not the word, but I don’t think the general knowledge of Rockwell prepares you for how dependent he was on photography.
Rockwell was a disciple of another illustrator named J. C. Leyendecker who also did covers for the Saturday Evening Post, and Leyendecker was adamant about never using photography and so I think instilled in Rockwell a certain guilt about using it. But on the other hand, all of his younger competitors, and I mean ALL of his younger competitors, used photography on a daily basis. So frankly, just to keep up, and stay afloat in his business, he really had to think more openly about adopting photography.
Again, it’s only sporadic, only when he poses say children or animals up to the 1920’s. Then the floodgates are really opened around 1935 when he gets this period where he felt he had kind of stalled, he had lived in Paris for a while to learn impressionist styles but it didn’t work out. He then had a prestigious commission to do new editions of “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn.” And here’s a a project where all of the models are going to be children so it became the perfect excuse to use photography throughout and he never looked back.
How do you deliberate over what work will go into the exhibition/the book from all that is available?
In some areas there’s more in the exhibition than there is in the book itself. It’s the exhibition that gave me a chance to take a second shot at the collection and re-think certain areas. So I think they compliment each other well and you really can’t get the whole story without experiencing both.
What we don’t have in the book but is in the exhibition specifically, are a large portion of his vintage work prints. And that is really not something that was possible for the book. It lends an immediacy I think because you can actually see the ones he chopped up into snippets and that adds an extra layer of his working process.
In your experience have you seen photography support another creative medium as well as this exhibition?
I can’t think of another body of work I’ve researched that is anywhere near as extensive as this one. Keep in mind, he was the most successful illustrator of his day, so he could afford to be as generous as he needed to be with materials, with his cameramen, and also his working method. The word I use in the show is that he was a “literalist.” He really needs the exact thing in front of him before he could put anything to canvas. Even as he revised that transfer he really needed it to be perfect, and so he could spend the time, the money, and the effort to make sure it was just right in the end. And that leaves behind a huge body of work. It also helped him to judge how it would look on the canvas in terms of the flat plane that a photographic print can provide.
What would you like people to walk away from this exhibit with stuck in their heads?
What a complex artist Rockwell was, because when I walked into this research, the first images I saw when I began were the photographs for some of the Civil Rights themed paintings, which were very tough. I think I came into the research with some pre-conceived Rockwellian notions that I think probably everyone has. What the photographs taught me from day one was to leave those notions behind. This is a complex body of work supporting the work of a complex artist.
Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera is currently on exhibit through September 18, 2011 at George Eastman House: International Museum of Photography & Film, Brackett Clark Gallery. Sponsored by M&T Bank with additional support provided by The Robert Lehman Foundation.
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