Featured Experts
Grant Romer
Grant Romer came to George Eastman House in 1975 upon entering the Graduate Photography Program at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He received his bachelor’s degree from Pratt Institute studying of the history of photography in 1964. Specializing in the daguerreotype, Romer began working with Alice Swan, then photograph conservator at GEH. In 1978, Romer became its conservator and focused on sharing the learning resources of the Museum by opening the laboratory to internships. Romer established the Certificate Program in Photographic Preservation at GEH in 1989, which eventually served as the basis for the current Advanced Residency Program, which he directed. Romer is an expert in the history, practice and preservation of the daguerreotype. His research, conservation activities and consulting has been sought out by collectors, dealers and institutions worldwide. In 2005, Grant Romer was the curator for the major traveling exhibition, “Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes.”
Lyle Rexer
Lyle Rexer is a critic, curator, scholar and teacher. He was educated at the University of Michigan, Columbia University (B.A. and M.A. degrees), and Merton College, Oxford University. He received the 2008-9 award from the Arts Writers Grant Program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for his project on abstraction in photography. He is the author of several books including, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (2009); How to Look at Outsider Art (2005); and Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes (2002). He contributes articles to The New York Times, Art in America, Aperture, Modern Painters, Parkett, Raw Vision, and Tate, Etc. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions in the United States and internationally, including “The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography.” Lyle Rexer teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and is a columnist for Photograph magazine.
Sarah Morthland
Sarah Morthland is the director and co-founder of ACMS Appraisals and Archive Consulting and Management Services LLC. Based in New York City, Ms. Morthland, with over thirty years of experience in the field, is regarded as a leading authority on 19th - 21st century photography. As a noted appraiser and archivist, she was recently a featured speaker at the 2010 National Conference of the Appraisers Association of America and guest panelist for the 2011 symposium “Rethinking the Photographic Archive in the 21st Century” hosted by the Jeu de Paume, Paris. She also appears in the upcoming PBS documentary Steven Caras: See Them Dance in which she reviews Mr. Caras’s archive of dance photographs. Her long-standing interest in early photographic processes led to her organization of the exhibition “Inventors & Alchemists” in 1998, and “The Antiquarian Avant-Garde,” an exhibition presented in association with the publication of Lyle Rexer’s book, in 2002.
