Eastman House Images Join Flickr’s “The Commons”

Delightful! The folks over at Flickr just announced that the George Eastman House has joined The Commons with three initial sets of images including the Chusseau-Flaviens collection, Southworth & Hawes and Autochromes.

George Eastman House is the oldest photography museum in the world, housed in the former home of Mr. George Eastman, the so-called father of modern photography and founder of Eastman Kodak company. The Museum is also one of the premiere centres of photographic conservation in the world.

The Chusseau-Flaviens collection depicts “social and political figures and events throughout Europe and the colonial empires in the Near East and the Far East” from the 1890s to just before World War I.

Messrs. Southworth & Hawes were partners in commercial studio in Boston, primarily shooting daguerreotype portraits. The studio opened in 1843, and closed twenty years later.

Auguste and Louis Lumière’s 1904 invention of the autochrome process produced the lovely images in the third gallery, Autochromes.

Can you imagine?

Auguste to Lumière: “Let’s dust some tiny potato starch grains dyed orange-red, green and violet onto a glass plate and then cover them with a layer of panchromatic silver bromide emulsion.”

Lumière: “Oh, that’s brilliant!”