The advertising campaigns launched by Kodak in the early years of
snapshot photography stand at the center of a shift in American domestic
life that goes deeper than technological innovations in cameras and
film. Before the advent of Kodak advertising in 1888, writes Nancy
Martha West, Americans were much more willing to allow sorrow into the
space of the domestic photograph, as evidenced by the popularity of
postmortem photography in the mid-nineteenth century. Through the taking
of snapshots, Kodak taught Americans to see their experiences as objects
of nostalgia, to arrange their lives in such a way that painful or
unpleasant aspects were systematically erased.
West looks at a wide assortment of Kodak's most popular inventions and
marketing strategies, including the "Kodak Girl," the momentous
invention of the Brownie camera in 1900, the "Story Campaign" during
World War I, and even the Vanity Kodak Ensemble, a camera introduced in
1926 that came fully equipped with lipstick.
At the beginning of its campaign, Kodak advertising primarily sold the
fun of taking pictures. Ads from this period celebrate the sheer
pleasure of snapshot photography--the delight of handling a diminutive
camera, of not worrying about developing and printing, of capturing
subjects in candid moments. But after 1900, a crucial shift began to
take place in the company's marketing strategy. The preservation of
domestic memories became Kodak's most important mission. With the
introduction of the Brownie camera at the turn of the century, the
importance of home began to replace leisure activity as the subject of
ads, and at the end of World War I, Americans seemed desperately to need
photographs to confirm familial unity.
By 1932, Kodak had become so intoxicated with the power of its own
marketing that it came up with the most bizarre idea of all, the "Death
Campaign." Initiated but never published, this campaign based on
pictures of dead loved ones brought Kodak advertising full circle.
Having launched one of the most successful campaigns in advertising
history, the company did not seem to notice that selling a painful
subject might be more difficult than selling momentary pleasure or
nostalgia.
Enhanced with over 50 reproductions of the ads themselves, 16 of them in
color, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia vividly illustrates the
fundamental changes in American culture and the function of memory in
the formative years of the twentieth century.
