How does a museum curator do their job

[LeoCherne]

At one point in my career I was involved in multi-projector shows. Not at the Tokyo auto show level but not bad for folks from a cowtown. I was just a camera monkey, shooting to script in the field and then using the rostrum camera for dupes and special effects. The camera was pretty neat as it had a joystick for zooming and framing/cropping/rotating the compound and a dos (pre-windows) pc to program movements as well as a dichroic colorhead to balance the duplicating film color. I believe it was named Marron-Carrel 1600, and it could generate miles of ektachrome and litho for masks. E-6 was done in a wing-lynch. The litho in a tabletop roller transport machine, like a dentist would have had. (The thing about production work is that after you learn how to do it well, it just becomes hand work.) Anyway, another crew member would program the projectors (I think one time we did a 24 projector show). At the time, film recorders for cgi were just coming about and video projectors were starting to improve. One of the crew got the idea to register 2 of those old 3 lens video projectors to make an image bright enough to see across a large room so a show could be shown in beta sp. Thus began the ascendancy of video and the mc 1600 became a serious paperweight, at least where I was. Thanks.

The MC 1600 had the joystick control, that was quite a piece of machinery. Can only imagine that by now no one has even seen one in the wild.

 

[LeoCherne]

Sorry...thought there might be a few here who would be curious about how someone with a big time photo career shares his history ( rear view mirror) in an evolving and growing fashion). It's beyond amateur material...but we're not all amateurs. It caught me when I was looking to see who else, other than myself, friends, and associates, had been involved with massive multi projector slide shows. There's more to museum photo exhibits than depressing street snaps.

I did, worked on assisted with a few multi-image / multi-projector shows in the past the last one I did was a museum piece - 24 projectors on a ~10x30 foot screen. It traveled to some 30 counties and was viewed by over 1.5M people, this was in the early 1990s. Not dreary street shots either. Slide shows were big stuff back in the day. Lot of people worked on, lot of money changed hands, lot of audiences got to see something that basically isn't available today.