On Monday at 3:20 p.m., the Kodak Tower, Eastman Business Park, the George Eastman Museum, and the rest of the Rochester metropolitan area in New York went dark for three and a half minutes.
As with most occurrences that qualify as an event these days — from the Super Bowl to a birthday party — making still and moving images of this eclipse was an inextricable part of the experience. Cameras — especially the kinds that can also make phone calls — were everywhere as viewing parties got underway.
Once the show had officially begun, lenses were pointed upward in spite of cloudy skies. More than the average Monday, Image City was living up to its old nickname.
For much of the 20th century, Rochester was “the imaging capital of the world.” Eastman Kodak, the photography behemoth with its headquarters in the city, employed as many 62,000 Rochesterians in the 1980s.
Then, in the mid-90s, around the same time the company was reporting peak revenues, two nascent technologies began to take hold: digital cameras and an intriguingly powerful means of distributing the photos they produced — the internet.
In January 2012, less than two decades after it was ranked as one of the most valuable brands on the planet, Kodak declared bankruptcy. Image City faded because it suddenly found itself in an Image World.
Rochester’s identity is still informed by its relationship to image technologies — Kodak currently employs 1,100 residents, Xerox another 1,500 — but the eclipse offered a rare boon from a different sector of industry: tourism. Mayor Malik Evans estimated 300,000 to 500,000 visitors came to the city of 209,000 to view and photograph the moon covering the sun, much like — borrowing an analogy from Annie Dillard’s 1982 essay “Total Eclipse” — a lens cap.
Monday’s eclipse is already being called the “most viewed” in history. When NASA estimated that 215 million Americans had viewed the 2017 eclipse, the agency combined those who saw it “either directly or electronically.” This year, with 32 million people living in the path of totality (compared with 12 million in 2017) and live coverage from most major TV networks, NASA, The Weather Channel and any amateur with the right equipment, that record was almost certainly broken.
NASA’s blurring of the lines that distinguish in person from remote watching is increasingly normal in a time when much of our everyday lives are lived via screens. Whether one’s eyes are focused on three dimensions in the world or two at home, viewing is viewing.
But the potentially profound psychological effects of witnessing a total eclipse in person have been documented and studied. In her essay, Dillard also wrote: “Usually it is a bit of a trick to keep your knowledge from blinding you. But during an eclipse it is easy. What you see is much more convincing than any wild-eyed theory you may know.”
In 2017, researchers at University of California, Irvine, concluded that, “Relative to individuals residing outside the eclipse’s path, individuals inside it exhibited more awe and expressed less self-focused and more prosocial, affiliative, humble, and collective language.”
Before humans learned to accurately predict eclipses, the sun’s spontaneous disappearance was a powerful occurrence, sometimes so moving it could change the course of history. In 585 B.C., the Eclipse of Thales prompted both sides on a battlefield in the Eastern Mediterranean to lay down their arms. In the age of photography, it has been images — like Jeff Widener’s Tank Man or Nick Ut’s Napalm Girl — not astronomical phenomena, that have proved capable of substantive consequence.
And yet, with countless live videos a click away and a partial eclipse viewable from outside 99 percent of American front doors, Rochester, along with other cities and towns positioned in the path of totality, was bombarded on Monday. Rental cars up and down the Erie Canal were sold out. The rate for rooms at the Hampton Inn and Suites downtown spiked to $700 a night.
We live in a moment of competing impulses: one defined by our bottomless appetite for making and consuming images, the other by a sneaking suspicion that we are what we eat and that the tangible world still offers something more.
Even if the crowds in Rochester on Monday were the result of an eclipse mania fueled by images circulated online, even if those crowds spent much of their precious seconds of totality taking pictures, it seems that, for many, for now, images alone are not enough.
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