George Eastman (1854-1932) had been on a tear. He had dreamed up a series of innovations that, when realized, transformed photography and its role in society, so much so that we may credit him with inventing this photograph and the two-Kodak family who arranged themselves around a slushy curb to take it in Washington DC. Thanks to Eastman, private life gained a new means of preserving its own history, an advance that marked the birth of modernity, in a visual sense at least.
Before the ‘Kodak revolution,’ a family’s ability to record its own existence, its own specific reality, was limited indeed. It helped if one were literate or could draw or paint, for art was the only direct means of capturing the look of one’s child’s face or the cut and color of the clothes one’s beloved wore. Photographers were professionals who wrangled obdurate equipment and understood the complex alchemy of developing the imagery. Either such a one, or a professional artist, could capture the look of a freak snowstorm as it was melting. Without photography of an accessible kind, one’s only hope of chronicling the weather or family life was to write a lot of letters or keep a careful diary.
Eastman’s genius was mechanical and conceptual, too. He invented a new camera and new film processes, while also envisioning a whole new social role for photography, which he realized by assuming all the burden of developing the photographs that Kodak customers made. “You press the button—we do the rest.” With that notion, Eastman transformed the relationship between the would-be photographer and the medium. He gave the world the snapshot, empowering amateurs to practice photography.
Eastman’s Kodak camera hit the streets in 1888. It was lightweight, small, and easy to work. Instead of sensitive or messy plates, his affordable camera was the first to employ roll film (another of his inventions). Once the pictures were taken, customers sent the film back to the company for developing. The very earliest Kodak prints were round, like the one above.
The new technology brought an immediacy to photography that, before, it seldom achieved. It eliminated the middleman, allowing a relationship-driven photography. The girl in this picture epitomizes the change, as she stands stock still, grinning, hugging a new Kodak camera close to her body. The wind lifts her coat hem. Her style and the swing of her mother’s skirt are just as they were in that earlier century. In the street, her father, Uriah Hunt Painter, presses a button, capturing his willowy wife and daughter as they half-stop and smile, a two-Kodak family on a winter’s day.
Image from this source.
