Synopses & Reviews
The advertising campaigns launched by Kodak in the early years ofsnapshot photography stand at the center of a shift in American domestic life thatgoes deeper than technological innovations in cameras and film. Before the advent ofKodak advertising in 1888, writes Nancy Martha West, Americans were much morewilling to allow sorrow into the space of the domestic photograph, as evidenced bythe popularity of postmortem photography in the mid-nineteenth century. Through thetaking of snapshots, Kodak taught Americans to see their experiences as objects ofnostalgia, to arrange their lives in such a way that painful or unpleasant aspectswere systematically erased.
West looks at a wideassortment of Kodak's most popular inventions and marketing strategies, includingthe Kodak Girl, the momentous invention of the Brownie camera in 1900, the StoryCampaign during World War I, and even the Vanity Kodak Ensemble, a cameraintroduced in 1926 that came fully equipped withlipstick.
At the beginning of its campaign, Kodakadvertising primarily sold the fun of taking pictures. Ads from this periodcelebrate the sheer pleasure of snapshot photography--the delight of handling adiminutive camera, of not worrying about developing and printing, of capturingsubjects in candid moments. But after 1900, a crucial shift began to take place inthe company's marketing strategy. The preservation of domestic memories becameKodak's most important mission. With the introduction of the Brownie camera at theturn of the century, the importance of home began to replace leisure activity as thesubject of ads, and at the end of World War I, Americans seemed desperately to needphotographs to confirm familial unity.
By 1932, Kodak had become so intoxicated with the power of its own marketing that it came upwith the most bizarre idea of all, the Death Campaign. Initiated but neverpublished, this campaign based on pictures of dead loved ones brought Kodakadvertising full circle. Having launched one of the most successful campaigns inadvertising history, the company did not seem to notice that selling a painfulsubject might be more difficult than selling momentary pleasure ornostalgia.
Enhanced with over 50 reproductions ofthe ads themselves, 16 of them in color, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia vividlyillustrates the fundamental changes in American culture and the function of memoryin the formative years of the twentieth century.