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The state of Wright in Buffalo
By Lisa Kane
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Anthony Bannon at the
George Eastman House.
Photo by Barbara Puorro Galasso.
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I’m obsessed with Isabella Rosellini. Anthony Bannon hangs out with her.
As director of the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Bannon gets to do lots of cool things. And he works really hard to make good things happen for the Eastman House and the international cultural community.
Ten years ago, Bannon left concurrent positions as the director of the Burchfield-Penney Art Center and associate vice president for cultural affairs at Buffalo State College, traveling seventy-five miles east to take on new challenges in Rochester. About leading the George Eastman House, an internationally important arts institution, Bannon says, “Our cultural world is also a world of civic leadership. It’s important that the cultural voice of this community, this state, and this nation is heard.”
Worth the drive
The George Eastman House is a nonprofit museum, an educational institution that tells the story of photography and motion pictures. The collections are huge: 500,000 photographs by more than 14,000 artists, 30,000 motion pictures produced from 1895 to the present (including more than twelve million feet of early cellulose nitrate-based film), four million pieces of film ephemera (including scripts, scores, and movie posters), and 16,000 examples of photographic equipment, from camera obscuras to digital cameras.
The house and gardens themselves are well worth a visit. After his death in 1932, George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, left his 35,000-square-foot Colonial Revival-style house, which includes thirty-seven rooms, thirteen baths, and nine fireplaces, to the University of Rochester. In 1947 New York State chartered the house as a photographic museum. It is now a National Historic Landmark, and is furnished with Eastman’s belongings, including artifacts that speak to his passion for hunting, like ashtrays made of hooves and an elephant-leg stool.
Eastman had purchased farmland surrounding his house to create an urban estate that functioned as both a working farm and an elegant setting for entertaining. Over the years, use of the grounds evolved to support the facility, but landscape restoration was undertaken in 1984 to reconstruct the original west terrace, library, and rock gardens—a total of eight gardens, greenhouses, and pergolas on eight and a half acres. Today the landscape collection is being carefully restored, conserved, and interpreted for visitors.
The George Eastman House presents an ambitious program of exhibitions, including Picturing Eden, which invites viewers to envision paradise, on view through September 4, and Why Look at Animals?, a survey of how animals have been depicted photographically, on view beginning September 23. For more information about exhibitions, film screenings, and other programs, visit www.eastmanhouse.org.
About Bannon
He came to Buffalo from Massachusetts, where his father taught at Dartmouth and Columbia Universities, during his last year of high school. Bannon stayed in Western New York while he finished his education, receiving his undergraduate degree from St. Bonaventure University in the mid-1960s, then an M.A. and, in 1994, a Ph.D., both from the University at Buffalo.
One career highlight was a stint as the art critic for the Buffalo News, which Bannon called, “a happy time with a great team of people, and the end of the old school—photographers still used Graflex Speed Graphic cameras.” (Picture the classic press camera of mid-twentieth century, the one with the big round flash on top.) Bannon also taught at the university level. He frequently writes about art, culture, and museum practices for academic and popular publications. These days, it is not unusual to find him quoted in publications like the New York Times.
Bannon’s family is also accomplished. His wife, Elizabeth Stewart, also from Buffalo, is a therapist with a private practice providing psychological testing for people in institutional settings, including prisoners. He has two sons: Nick Bannon, the oldest, is an administrator at Texas School for the Deaf. Brendan Bannon is a freelance photographer working in Somalia, Nairobi, and Kenya, taking photographs for UNICEF. Bannon and Stewart live in a historic house that was built in 1924 by Howard Hansen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and former director of the Eastman School of Music. They are the home’s second owners, so the property’s Eastman legacy is complete.
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Anthony Bannon at the George Eastman House.
Photo by Barbara Puorro Galasso.
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Famous friends
One of Bannon’s initiatives at the George Eastman House has been to bring people from outside the Rochester area into leadership positions. He notes, “The George Eastman House has always served the nation and the world, but until recently it has not shared governance widely. Now almost half of the board’s trustees are from outside the metro Rochester area.” Until her term ended recently, one of those trustees was Isabella Rosellini. Bannon confirms what I’d guessed: “She’s wonderful, giving, intense, easygoing, and focused.” And now she is someone Bannon calls a friend.
On Buffalo
Asked about his many accomplishments at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, which included creating lasting alliances with M&T Bank, Buffalo State College and other area colleges, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and, probably most notably, the renowned collector Charles Rand Penney, Bannon says, “It had less to do with accomplishments and more to do with the extraordinary cast of characters that we assembled.” For example? “Everyone working hard to make a show happen, then gathering after the opening reception to finish off the booze. It was an eccentric group, but one that enjoyed celebrating each other.”
And what he misses about Buffalo? “The city lives its cultural life in a way that has great joy and a lot of energy. Buffalo lives its culture.”
Lisa Kane is a writer living in Buffalo
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