The New York City-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $4 million grant to the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York, to expand its academic program in photograph conservation, the Associated Press reports.

The grant, to be spread over four years, will enable the museum, which launched an advanced residency program in photograph conservation in 1999, to train some forty students from around the world for a profession in which fewer than one hundred people work full time.

"Photography changed the way we think and changed what we know," said Grant Romer, the museum's director of conservation. "You'd think there would be great investments from many sources assuring the preservation of the most important part of that record. In actuality, it's a very, very small field with very small amounts of money invested in it."