Product Description

Now back in print, this life of George Eastman is the first biography since 1930 of the man who transformed the world of photography. In this revealing and informative work, Brayer shows us how such key innovations as roll film and the light, hand-held camera helped the Eastman Kodak Company dominate the world market. More importantly, Brayer draws a vivid portrait of the man behind the money. Eastman worked hard at staying out of the limelight and even insisted that his donations be kept anonymous, prompting the Boston Globe to call him "America's most modest and least-known millionaire." Despite his retirement in 1925, Eastman showed little sign of slowing down. Making money had been interesting, but putting money to work became more so. In the 1920s he designed a special camera for use in orthodontia and established elaborate dental clinics for needy children around the world. He oversaw the building of the Eastman theatre and the Eastman School of Music. His contributions built a new campus for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a new medical school for the University of Rochester. Finally, he became the largest contributor to the education of African Americans during the 1920s and the Tuskegee Institute's most important benefactor. Elizabeth Brayer lives in Rochester, NY. For the past 18 years she has served on both the George Eastman Legacy and the Landscape committees at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film. She writes about the history of central and Western New York State. George Eastman: A Biography was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1996.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #976152 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 637 pages

From Amazon.com
The innovative founder of the Eastman Kodak Company was not generally known for his thirst for adventure, his love of art and classical music, or his philanthropic activities, yet these were all important aspects of the man. George Eastman (1854-1932) was a complicated individual who lived most of his long, industrious life out of the public eye; his private affairs both admirable and dubious are now out in the open, thanks to this scholarly and scrupulous biography. Eastman is revealed as cold, shrewd, modest, and surprisingly generous in this colorful portrait. The text is appropriately enhanced by a number of rare photographs.

From Publishers Weekly
In 1904, when the Dalai Lama had to flee Tibet, he took his Kodak camera. Worldwide, people understood. The cultural revolution begun in 1888 when George Eastman (1854-1932) made photography accessible to anyone with $25 had been completed in 1900, when his Brownie made picture-taking possible for anyone with a dollar (and 15? for film). Brayer, a historian at the Eastman-endowed International Museum of Photography and Film, has written a candid, fact-crammed life of the first camera-and-film tycoon that loses somewhat in liveliness by leaving out almost nothing about how the camera business was dominated for years by Eastman's canny and baronial practices. A bank clerk as a young man, he was astute enough by his late 20s to weather financial difficulties and manufacture cheap, workable film while withstanding what would become decades of litigation, much of which he won, over patent infringement and antitrust charges. In the end the mother's boy who could never cut the silver cord and marry was wedded to an enterprise that made him, in wealth, a peer of Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford. Catchphrases advertising his cameras ("You Press the Button, We Do the Rest") sold billions of feet of film and threatened to make "Kodak" a common noun for "camera." He resisted with challenges over trademark and with the maxim "If it isn't an Eastman it isn't a Kodak." His relentless social Darwinism would pay off in consolidations, mergers and buyouts that left him with so many dollars (and no heirs) that only massive educational and cultural philanthropies could reduce the accumulation. "Mr. Eastman," one associate concluded, "was the only man I ever knew who started out a conservative and wound up a liberal." Brayer's biography of the boy fired up by "Oliver Optic" stories such as Work and Win and A Millionaire at Sixteen captures the expansive if callous period in American business in which such fortunes were made. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Brayer, a former historian at the Eastman House in Rochester, New York, has written the second biography of George Eastman to make it to publication. The first, written in 1930 by Carl Ackerman, was commissioned and edited by Eastman himself. Since then, several others have been commissioned by Kodak but have never been published, including attempts by such capable historians as Andre Maurois and Beaumont Newhall. Whatever speculation this may create, historian Brayer does not seem to have presented a romanticized or sanitized version of Eastman's entrepreneurial and philanthropic efforts. The text serves as a history of technological revolution in the photographic medium and the emergence of "big business" via the Kodak empire. It is also a detail-rich look at turn-of-the-century central New York. An essential purchase for most libraries.?Kathy J. Anderson Indiana Univ., Bloomington
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.