George Eastman Museum

Published under the George Eastman Museum name, this feed is built from interview recordings, and every episode in the recent run carries the 'Silver Voices' prefix. Several come in numbered parts. One Brett Weston session reaches Part 8. The subjects do nearly all the talking, and the tape keeps the room around them: friends arriving by motor home, a phone call being arranged before the recorder goes off, a request to take a little break. Ansel Adams's session is introduced on tape as a background interview for a Brett Weston project, and Brett is the figure most of the recent episodes circle. Adams remembers first meeting him at Albert Bender's in San Francisco around 1927 or 1928, and warns up front that he is bad with dates. He is also asked whether Brett was an influence on Edward. Dody W. Thompson, across two parts, talks about growing up in New Orleans and studying at Black Mountain College before turning to Brett. Her Brett does not put his work into words. He lets a visitor come along while he photographs and ask questions, and commercial jobs played a very small role in his living. She argues that his use of form for its own sake did not come from Edward, pointing instead to modern art and to names like Georgia O'Keeffe, Brancusi and Archipenko. Then Brett speaks for himself. Going through his own photographs, the talk places one of his first 8x10 photographs in Santa Barbara around 1934, recalls a cactus garden in Montecito, and lands on a joke about plagiarizing himself. He is blunt about his peers, too, with a story of a room full of photographers fixed on Steichen and a memory of Ernst Haas presenting a slideshow. Walter Clark's session steps back to the institution. He recounts George Eastman House being formed as a memorial and an educational institute for the art and science of photography, with Kodak and the university setting up a board, and he describes a lab whose job is identifying how an object was made. Harold Lloyd's 1958 interview is the outlier, and a natural entry point for film listeners. Picking up where his book An American Comedy left off, he explains that Welcome Danger was made and previewed as a silent film before it became his first talking picture. He talks about how hard good gag men are to find, and recalls settling a question of style by drawing a slip from a hat that read 'make it legitimate'. He closes by praising Jim Card and the institute's work preserving the industry's history. Where to begin depends on the draw: Lloyd for cinema, the Thompson parts for Brett seen from outside, Clark for how George Eastman House came to exist.