ROCHESTER, NY.- George Eastman House International Museum of Photography & Film presents Africas: Photographs from the Eastman House Collection, a look at the museum's collection photographs that suggest some of the many ways Africa has touched our lives. It is on view through Sept. 28, 2008. The Africas exhibition is part of a three-exhibition series by the same title, "Africas," which focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, on view at Eastman House this summer.

Africas: Photographs from the Eastman House Collection features a rare 1845 daguerreotype from Mozambique — one of the first photographs ever taken in Africa — and contemporary portarits by West Africans Malick Sidibé and Hamidou Maïga. Also on view will be stereoacards from the 1920s, work originally published in LIFE by Margaret Bourke-White and Eugene Smith, a home movie of big-game hunting made by George Eastman, and an Africa safari album made by Eastman with his friends Osa and Martin Johnson. Other featured photographers are Mary Ellen Mark, Nickolas Muray, and Arnold Newman.

The photographs feature African tribes, Nelson Mandela on the day of his release, goldminers in South Africa, children and animals of Africa, dancing and music, and portraits of the people. The exhibition displays work made by journalists, tourists, artists, and ethnographers. Mining the collection to create the Africas exhibition has inspired Eastman House to be more aggressive in collecting images of Africa, including images of Africa by Africans.

"This exhibition is not in any way an exhaustive survey of African photographs, nor is it an African take on Africa," said Dr. Alison Nordström, Eastman House curator of photographs. "Rather it is a random slice of our collection that reveals as much by absence as by presence."

Eastman House´s extensive holdings of 19th- and 20th-century French, British, and American photographs have made the museum one of the most important photography collections in the world. However, most of the photographs in the collection reflect the interests and biases of Euroamerican photographers.

"Collections are a product of their circumstances, shaped by curators, trustees, institutions, and the political and cultural climate, as well as happenstance and serendipity," Nordström said. "Part of our mission is to share and interpret our collections with the public and in doing so we may be rewarded by unexpected insights about the depth and/or deficits of our holdings; what we donÕt have in the collection is sometimes as interesting as what we have."