Anyone old enough to have been tuned in to world events in 1968 can tell you how it felt. It was the year when everything seemed to be coming apart.

The war in Vietnam was raging, and unrest roiled black neighborhoods in cities across the country. Then, in the spring of 1968, came the unthinkable: the assassinations, within months of each other, of the country's greatest civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and, to many, the country's greatest hope for the presidency, Sen. Robert Kennedy.

Even before the assassinations of that tumultuous year, plans for a new kind of socially conscious exhibition were under way at George Eastman House. The museum, which had previously focused on the historical, aesthetic, and technical aspects of photography, was about to become relevant in a manner that not everyone was ready for.

 "Conscience the Ultimate Weapon" - a multimedia slide show about dissent, with multiple projections, a soundtrack featuring speeches by King, music by Bob Dylan and others, and a great deal more - opened in 1968, causing no shortage of controversy.

Forty years later, with another unpopular war being fought on the other side of the world, and another inspiring young presidential candidate capturing the imagination of a large portion of the population, the Eastman House is mounting a reconstruction of that show.

It's one exhibition in a series the museum is organizing under the title "Loss/Hope." This series follows the Eastman House's success last year with "Witness: Know War/Know Genocide."

"Loss/Hope" also showcases the work of two Magnum photographers, one who travels the world covering unrest, and another who documents African-American life in the United States. And, in addition to these shows, there are three historic exhibits involving poverty in the United States and abroad.

"Conscience the Ultimate Weapon," the most controversial exhibition in the museum's history, was composed of the work of Benedict J. Fernandez, who will visit Rochester to present an illustrated lecture at 6 p.m. on Thursday, March 13, in the museum's Dryden Theatre (included with museum admission). Fernandez grew up a mixed child in the rough, mixed neighborhood of Spanish Harlem. His father was Puerto Rican and his mother Italian American.

"I knew that on one side of Third Ave. I had to speak Spanish," says Fernandez, who spoke to City by phone from his New Jersey studio. "But once I got to the other side, I had better speak Italian."

When asked how he came to make these historic photographs, including many chronicling the last year of King's life, Fernandez tells a long, but fascinating story. While in high school in the 1950's he got a job developing film and pursued photography as a hobby. A few years later, he was photographing a performance when another photographer asked if he had any extra film. He gave the man two rolls.

As a result of his kindness, the man introduced him to Alexey Brodovitch, the Russian photographer and designer who served as art director for Harper's Bazaar from 1938 to 1958. Fernandez had no idea how influential an artist his new acquaintance was, or how pivotal a figure Brodovitch would prove to be in his life.

Brodovitch looked at his portfolio and liked it enough to give Fernandez a scholarship to his famous Design Laboratory.

"I thought I must be a genius," Fernandez says. "I had no idea my work was that good." With his scholarship, Fernandez had the responsibility of driving Brodovitch each week to the class, which was held at the studio of another legendary photographer, Richard Avedon.

Basking in his new-found genius, the first night Fernandez placed his portfolio first in line to be critiqued by Brodovitch. "He picks up the portfolio, he acts like he's never seen it before, and he says ‘This portfolio is shit. This person is not qualified to be in this class.' I went from being 7' tall to about a foot and a half. But I grew up in Spanish Harlem on Third Ave. What was important was not the problem but the solution. So I looked at Brodovitch and said, ‘You old bastard, you're icing me in front of these people to show how tough you are. Well you're stuck with me for 10 weeks and that's it. And I'm not talking to you.'"

Eventually, they became friends and, through Brodovitch, Fernandez met and became close to a Who's Who of mid-20th century photography, including Lisette Model, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, and Minor White.

To make a living, Fernandez was working as an engineer and crane operator at Bethlehem Steel Shipyard in Hoboken. He shot his first photographic portfolio, "Riggers," there. Later, he worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When it closed in 1963 he decided to pursue a career in photography.

Brodovitch made his students think beyond the photographic image and Fernandez rose to the challenge. One day Brodovitch gave the group an assignment to create a reflection on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

"I took red paint and dropped it on black cardboard and let it run. On another board I let it set and dry. Brodovitch loved it," he says.

But photography was not taken as seriously as it is now. Fernandez always had to find ways to make money to support his family. He shot weddings and took a job photographing Boy Scouts at the 1964 World's Fair, where he proved his resourcefulness.

"One day a kid said, ‘Would you take my picture in front of the Unisphere?' I took it and said, ‘Get the whole troop here.' I took the picture and told them it would be a dollar for an 8"x10", and I'd have them tomorrow. The next day I delivered 40 prints; I got $40. At the end of that year 26,000 boy scouts had come through and I got a dollar from each one of them."

But his real photographic career took off one day in his mentor's office.

"Brodovitch, on May Day, he looks at me and says, ‘You need a project.' I said ‘I've got a project, I'm photographing.' He said, ‘No, no.' He looks out the window and he shows me Union Square, and there was a group saying: get out of Santo Domingo. The other group was Cubans saying: you are Communists. I got a great picture of a Cuban woman with a sign saying, ‘USA love it or leave it.' I started photographing them and that's what did it."

He was still a little green.

"Let's put it this way," says Fernandez, "it took 40 rolls to get four good pictures when I started. When I ended about five years later I'd shoot four rolls to get 40 good pictures, because I became so immersed in it."

Fernandez would go on to become a leading educator in the field of photography. He established the photography department at the New School of Social Research in New York. He also founded the Photo Film Institute in the basement of Joseph Papp's Public Theatre, teaching photography to poor children free of charge.

The first time Nathan Lyons, then associate director and curator of photographs at the Eastman House, saw Fernandez's work, he liked it enough to ask him if he had more.

"So I brought up a box of 500 contact sheets," says Fernandez. "He looked at it and said - a little bit sarcastically, I think - ‘Do you have any more?' So I brought two more boxes and he had 1,500 sheets."

Lyons made his selection, but he did not want to display the photographs in the traditional manner.

"I was concerned about how topical material like Ben's project was being shown," says Lyons. "It had to do essentially with the right of dissent across the board. It wasn't just Vietnam.

"I wanted to establish an environment that I thought would more effectively communicate his concerns. So I didn't want framed prints on a wall," Lyons continues. "I wanted the images to be life-size so that the person who's going through the exhibition was almost a participant in the events they were looking at."

Interns converted the photographs to slides, a format that was unusual for a museum show in1968. Reginald Herron put the show together in terms of media.

Lyons also knew the exhibition was a departure from the Eastman House's aesthetically oriented shows; photojournalism hadn't yet made its way into museums.

"At the time it was probably a very controversial position to take. I wanted to address the issues and not stand back from them. It was the year after the Rochester riots, so there was a lot of peripheral tension," Lyons says.

But the main resistance came from inside the museum. It concerned a photo of a person carrying a sign saying "napalm burns."

"It was the chairman of the board, who happened to be an ex-vice president of Kodak," Lyons says. "He made an issue that there was too much napalm in it. There was only one image about napalm. Subsequently I found out he had been involved in the development of napalm."

The museum had its qualms, but once the show opened - with the napalm image intact - the public had a different reaction.

Anticipating a controversy, the museum had reduced the show's run from three weeks to one week. But Lyons had put out 1,000 questionnaires and, according to Fernandez, 993 came back positive.

Shortly after the opening a minister asked to use the Dryden Theatre so that his congregation could see the show and then discuss it. The show's run was restored to three weeks. Demand continued to grow and the show ended up running for at total of six weeks. Then the New York State Council on the Arts supplied funding for it to travel to other venues.

 "The public response was absolutely phenomenal," says Lyons. "It announced to me that there were other projects that needed to be done."

Lyons was fired from the Eastman House a few months later, but he says the show was not particularly the reason. He founded Visual Studies Workshop a few blocks away and served as director for the rest of his career.

The show's new incarnation will feature digital slides and additional new work by Fernandez.

"The new and the old are the same," Fernandez says. "Protesters in front of the United Nations with dummies of George Bush and signs saying ‘Get out of Iraq.'"

Images of dissent and unrest are also flashing across screens at the other end of the museum's Potter Peristyle, where "Larry Towell: The World From My Front Porch" is on display.

This large multimedia show, exploring the work of the Magnum photographer, was done in collaboration with Rick Hock, the Eastman House's current director of exhibitions. At almost every turn visitors will encounter videos and films of people caught in turmoil. The largest of these video installations is comprised of three wall-size screens, where one scene of conflict or devastation is juxtaposed with another.

"On the center screen is [Hurricane] Katrina, on the left screen is Gaza, on the right screen is Cape Town [South Africa], and they just continue to blend through," says Hock, who worked on the exhibition for three months with his staff. "You begin to see the similarities of the environments. Then it opens into a piece on the anti-globalization riots in Quebec. It covers all the issues and blends the world."

Another video carries a title playing on Henri Cartier-Bresson's concept of the decisive moment. "Indecisive Moments" is a film Towell describes as a highly personal video diary of photographing from 2001 to 2006 in the occupied territories of Israel. At one point, when Towell is confronted by an Israeli soldier, he is defiant about his right to be there.

The Towell show is unusual in its extensive use of installations. Instead of simply showing the photographs Towell took in El Salvador, Palestine, or New Orleans, the museum has put together displays of objects he collected, including the broken locks of doors that were kicked in, slings for hurling rocks at Israeli troops, tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, and a UNICEF water bottle with a label that helps people recognize unexploded cluster bombs.

In one display case is a prosthetic arm with a hook on the end of it, next to a mortar shell. In a wall case is someone's waterlogged photo album from New Orleans.

Another unusual aspect of the show is an entire room dedicated to Towell's home life in Ontario, Canada. These bucolic scenes of family life in a picturesque farmhouse couldn't be more opposite from the images he shoots for Magnum. The show's title is drawn from this section.

His children swim in a beautiful stream, his pregnant wife curls up naked with her young daughter who, a few years later, is shown, in a beautiful composition, in the hollow of a tree. In this room, the multi-media involves the country music Towell and his family create when he is not confronting the world's horrors.

"That's what's unique about this exhibit," says Hock. "I don't know of another exhibit that has been so comprehensive on a journalist's life. But that's who Larry is. Everything is involved with everything else. The ability to rapidly make prints, to combine with video and audio, all of that has been mediated by digital technology."

Because the show is a career retrospective, yet another section contains Towell's gorgeous pictures of the Amish, including several compositions reminiscent of Vermeer paintings.

One particularly stunning image, "Kent County, Ontario, Canada, 1993," depicts a beautiful baby curled up sleeping, surrounded by pickle barrels.

In keeping with the non-traditional nature of this exhibition, Towell will discuss his work in a most unusual way at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 27, in the Dryden Theatre (included with admission). He will show photographs and play music along with harmonica virtuoso Mike Stevens. He will also sign copies of his new book published in conjunction with the exhibition.

On the walls of the hallway outside the Towell show is "Black In America: Eli Reed" (through June 29). Another Magnum photographer, Reed has documented the lives of African Americans for the last several decades.

Images range from weddings to boxers, from parades to girls dressed up for high school cotillion. Reed is currently in Rochester documenting African-American life here. These images, updated frequently, are displayed on a computer screen in the exhibition.

Also on display through June 15 are three historical exhibitions of work by photographers whose images display social consciousness.

"Lewis W. Hine: Let Children Be Children" showcases the great early 20th century photographer's images of child labor in sweatshops, mines, cotton fields and textile mills. Hine's photographs were instrumental in changing labor laws in the United States.

"Picturing the New Deal: The FSA Photographs of Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott" includes images commissioned by the U.S. government, documenting the downtrodden people of the dustbowl and the Great Depression.

"John Thompson: Street Life in London," a display of an 1877 publication exposing the hidden-from-view life of London's poorest citizens, shows that photography with the purpose of affecting change is not a new concept. 

Conscience The Ultimate Weapon

March 12-June 1

George Eastman House, 900 East Ave.

Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. (Thursday until 8 p.m.); Sunday 1-5 p.m. | $3-$8 | 271-3361, eastmanhouse.org