The exhibition Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, opening in the Museum’s Holmes Gallery on October 13, 2012, will reveal the role of photography in Rockwell’s creative process. For today’s museum visitors, it is a revelation to discover that so many of Rockwell’s most memorable characters were, in fact, real people. From the beginning of his career he employed professional models, requiring them to spend long hours in static poses. To achieve greater naturalism, Rockwell adopted photography in the late 1930’s, and began to call on friends and neighbors to model and bring new flesh-and-blood realism to his work. A natural storyteller, Rockwell envisioned his narrative scenarios down to the smallest detail. Curator and author Ron Schick was the first to undertake a frame-by-frame study of the Norman Rockwell Museum’s newly digitized photography archive.