Did You Really Need to Be There to See It?

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.

A sense of melancholia at the George Eastman Museum.

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.