COLORAMA
The World's Largest Photographs
From 1950 to 1990, Coloramas greeted millions who passed through New York City's Grand Central Terminal, presenting an idealized image of postwar America. Created by the Eastman Kodak Company, the colossal eighteen feet high and sixty feet wide backlit color transparencies represented a technological leap in the world of marketing and projected an image of an abundant, prosperous, and scientifically advanced America. However, for all the optimism suggested in the images, one sees none of the realities of a society divided harshly along racial and socio-economic lines and the civil unrest that it produced. As curator Alison Nordström notes, Coloramas "served to manifest and visualize values that even then were misunderstood as nostalgic and in jeopardy, salvageable only through the time-defying alchemy of Kodak cameras and film."
This exhibition features a selection of large-scale photographs made from the more than five-hundred original transparencies, providing a view of the optimism and prosperity of certain segments of American society during the second half of the twentieth century.
Organized by the George Eastman Museum
FREE PUBLIC LECTURE: Wednesday, October 5, 5:30-6:30 pm, Weiss Center for the Arts, #235
"Dreaming in Color: The Kodak Colorama and American Ideas"
Alison Nordström, Guest Curator
Family in Convertible Somewhere in Texas, 1968 (detail)
Jim Pond
