IMAGINE a world without photography— no television, movies or snapshots. This was the way it was until 1839. If people wanted pictures of themselves or their children, they had to hire an artist. Only the rich had portraits of themselves and their families.

George Eastman did not invent photography. Events in France and in England in the 1820s and 30s led to the introduction of photography in both places in 1839. When George Eastman was born 17 years later, in 1854, cameras were huge wooden boxes, so heavy that they required tables or tripods. Photography was an arduous process.

"Professional" photographers worked in studios where people went for portraits. It took so long to develop a picture that people could not smile. They could hardly breathe. Their heads had to be held in iron clamps so that they could not move. Most look very uncomfortable in their photographs.

"Amateur" photographers worked in the field. They lugged heavy cameras and a backpack full of supplies with tents to process their pictures outside. Sometimes it took them all day to "take" one photograph.

In the 1850s, families did not own cameras. To have your picture taken by a photographer was a special event. Professional photographers had studios in larger cities. Traveling photographers visited towns and villages pulling a studio on wheels behind a horse. In the 1850s George Eastman’s parents had daguerreotype photographs taken of themselves in a studio. They held their breaths and did not smile. In the late 1920s Eastman had an artist paint portraits from these daguerreotypes. He then hung them in his living room with the Rembrandts, Romneys and van Dycks. Now he had not only instant ancestors from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the wall but his immediate family too.

One problem was that Eastman could not remember the color of his mother’s eyes or hair when she was a young woman. Relatives said that her hair resembled that of her great-granddaughter, Ellen Maria Dryden. For the eyes, Eastman recalled that he had Rochester artist Robert Macameron paint her portrait in 1905. That portrait had hung on the stage at the opening of Kilbourn Hall in the Eastman School of Music in 1921 and was now with Eastman’s niece in Chicago. Rather than send the painting to the artist, Philip de Laszlo, Eastman had a glass eye made to the correct color.