What is this all about?

This curated collection on the Kodak Brownie Camera is my response to a course assignment for "Textual Machinery & Rhetorical Agency, Ancient to Digital" within Syracuse Universities Composition and Cultural Rhetoric program. As a graduate student of art education visual literacy and the idea of 'democratization' of literacy is of high importance to me. This blog, while originally about the Kodak Brownie as a dead technology, has taken a focus on the advertising campaigns that revolved around this technology, and the agency that they attempted to ascribe to their target audiences. This emphasis is a reflection on my cross-departmental interest in visual culture, the importance of recognizing and interpreting it, and the depth of information it can reveal to us as researchers.

On a technical note:

• This blog has been reformatted, it may be most useful if read in a 'top to bottom' manner.
  

A Parallel Presence: Currated and Exponential

Pearl Tree, a social curating tool, allows users to 'pick' 'pearls' (or web addresses that they value), organizing and sharing them with others. I have, parallel to this blog, created a pearltree that begins to curate other online presence that supports,extends, and applies what you see here. Commentary on many of the 'pearls' reflects the continued connections to advertising, visual culture, agency, technology and education. From here, place your courser on the 'pearl' of interest and you will be provided with a screen shot. See the yellow circle at the bottom left for narration.

Potential Scholarly Resuorces

The following are a list of scholarly resources that I have compiled on this topic. My goal is to annotate some of these works, and utilize them in adding to the accumulated wealth of information that is available on the 'free' web, as many are not freely accessible. I mean not to reference these as the pinnacle of knowledge, simply give some degree of access to them and allow them to assist us outside of their relatively closed shelves.

Motz, M. (1989). Visual Autobiography: Photograph Albums of Turn-of-the-Century Midwestern Women. American Quarterly, 41(1). Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2713193

Oliver, M. (2007). George Eastman’s Modern Stone-Age Family: Snapshot Photography and the Brownie. Technology and Culture, 48(1), 1-19. DOI: 10.1353/tech.2007.0035

Rawlings, P. (1998). A Kodak Refraction of Henry James’s “The Real Thing”. Journal of American Studies, 32(3), 447-462. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27556478

Taylor, J. (1994). Kodak and the ‘English’ Market between the Wars. Journal of Design History, 7(1), 29-42. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1316055

West, N. M. (2000). Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia. Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia.

"Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia"

West, N. M. (2000). Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia. Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia.

Abstract: Chapter 3- “Operated by Any School Boy or Girl” The Marketing of the Brownie Camera: The first Brownie came out in 1900, a very simple black box made of jute board. The camera sold very well and there were eventually many editions of it released. The central advertising theme within the first ten years was Palmer Cox’s Brownie. With the increased ability to reproduce photography in newspapers and magazines the advertising began to juxtapose the cartooned with the photographed. While women and girls were the primary users in advertisements (and the primary target audience) that claimed ease of use and play, this changed with the targeting of boys and technical data became available.

Thesis: Chapter 3- “Operated by Any School Boy or Girl” The Marketing of the Brownie Camera: Kodak’s central advertising campaign of nostalgia was initiated through the Brownie campaign, connecting nostalgia with the desire for lost childhood.

Quotes:

“Perhaps more than ever before, we depend on photography not only to enrich but to “certify” our experiences, according to Susan Sontag, who cavalierly argues “it hardly matters what activities are photographed so long as photographs get taken and are cherished.” ” (xii)

“The striking feature of photography- especially the ubiquitous production and dissemination of amateur photography “produced” by the Kodak corporation- is that it creates the illusion of its existence as a gift (inalienable, qualitative, the product of a human subject) even while it is bound, part and parcel, within a system of commodities (alienable, quantitative), a seemingly freestanding “thing” in a system in which “persons and things both become thinglike” (5)

“The Brownie’s direct appeal to children thus legitimized photography as real play, children constituting the only social group whose status in modern culture rests on play’s associations with innocence, spontaneity, imagination, and freedom… a form of innocence that could, in fact, never be experienced again.” (75-76)

“Unlike photographs, moreover, cartoons make no claim to accuracy; instead, they demand we see reality in their terms. Their figurative status, in other words, requires a new way of looking.” (97-98)

“By exploiting the connotations and metaphysics of the cartoon, these ads effectively purged photography of its stillness and linked it with animation.” (98)

Why are photographs of 19th century children so darn creepy?

In reviewing Nancy Martha Wests text on marketing and the Kodak company I have found the brief analysis of photography from the child's point of view slightly comic, and relevant to agency. West points out that a child's only experience with a camera, prior to 1900, was a highly controlled and arranged scene. In referencing Gisele Freund, Society and Photography, we are provided with the vision that I have sketched. Children are placed in the studio, and captured by their play, rather than capturing their play, or a photography, as the Brownie allows.

To elaborate, within studio photography children are placed in an atmospheres that has references to their interests and particularities. But, they are not placed in the space to play, to exert their own agency, but to be played with like dolls, dressed up and posed. In this manner the scene becomes their reality turned upside down by adult controls, where they no longer rule their imagination in play, but the props do. The Brownie switched this relationship back, giving agency (of some limited degree) back to the child.

"George Eastman's Modern Stone-Age Family: Snapshot Photography and the Brownie"

Oliver, M. (2007). George Eastman’s Modern Stone-Age Family: Snapshot Photography and the Brownie. Technology and Culture, 48(1), 1-19. DOI: 10.1353/tech.2007.0035

Abstract: Research that focuses on the Kodak Brownie is limited in quantity and direction. Few have acknowledged its relevance, and folklore historians tend to overlook it due to its stance as technology. This work analyzes Palmer Cox’s use of the folkloric character, it’s placement in advertising and technology. Further, it analyzes the mastery of which Eastman employed in utilizing the Brownie characters, and defining his product and its role. And finally, Oliver makes the jump from the Brownies as folklore and advertisement, to the “Brownie” clubs we know today.

Thesis: Eastman utilized the Brownie character to redefine snapshot photography, not as less than art, but as a universal language that transcended oral and textual histories, social barriers, and provided the new generations of modernity with a means to ‘make special’.

Quotes:

‘ “The Brownie is not a Kodak”, and should not be used in reference to the Brownie, “A genuine Kodak for 99 cents” Kodak trade circular, no 4 (March 1990).’ (3)

“ “Though the Brownies are apolitical and emerge nightly from a region which is never geographically defined, to anyone who reads even a few of the Brownie books it is obvious that the world of the Brownies not only is utopian, but embodies characteristics commonly associated with the American dream.” Cummings, R. Humorous but Wholesome: A History of Palmer Cox and the Brownies (Watkins Glen, N.Y., 1973), 113-114.” (in reference to the adaption of the folkloric Brownies of Cox) (5)

“Far from being the solitary nocturnal creatures of folklore, Cox’s Brownies enjoy all the latest trappings of modernity and seem to prefer human technical achievement over their own magical powers. They effectively enchant the machines they use, thereby responding to the need for wonder in the modern age- a need articulated by Andre Kedros as “a modern marvel, capable of exorcising the menacing technological environment and showing the ways leading to the mastery no longer of nature, but of technology itself”. (6)

“Although a product of industry, the Brownie camera maintains and anachronistic allegiance to folk culture, as if the impetus to create the device had come from the Brownies themselves. But as a “memory machine,” the Brownie was allied much more with oral history than with the printed word. The new Brownie figure asserts an equivalence between snapshot culture and preindustrial traditions of storytelling.” (9)

“Through photography, the past reenters the present, and the present becomes a treasured past- human time commingles with that of the fairies.” (11)

“Eastman’s “intended consumers were not professional photographers,” remarks Marianne Hirsch, “but people who had seen photographs but had not thought of actually taking them any more than they might have considered painting pictures, writing novels, or composing music.” Hirsch’s comparison reminds us that cultural practices and attitudes could have led many people to self-exclude from photographic expression- no matter how affordable- were it not for Eastman’s aggressive Brownie campaign.” (11)

“In Steichen’s declaration as in Eastman’s, the representation of photography as a universal language trumps (but does not exclude) artistic expression… Steichen’s “The Family of Man” is commonly interpreted as a postwar search for commonalities among disparate cultures, but the Brownie’s impact on the formative years of snapshot photography suggests a public already condition to equate photography with bands of united folk from all walks of life (modern and primitive).” (11)

“Although lacking in traditional power, users ostensibly gain visual control over their surroundings and are able to make their outlook concrete and valuable through photographs… the Brownie enthusiast is promised authorial status, however mediated the production of his or her story.” (16)

“On the negative side, the Brownie club aims to create a nation of prepubescent consumers- junkies hooked on a brand before they learn to tie their shoes… Further, one can argue that the Brownie’s most sinister accomplishment is to commodity childhood.” (16)

“Like the “You press the button, we do the rest” campaign that preceded it, the Brownie tale teaches that photographic self-expression, however magical, must pass through the industrial complexes headed by a technologically skilled “man by the inland seas.” (17)

“In the images of children photographing Brownies, the camera is used as a transition between the child and the folkloric figure, suggesting an affinity between childhood and enchantment, both of which are made accessible to adults through the camera.” (17)

“The characterization of children as Brownies reveals the camera’s power to seize the ephemeral, fleeting nature of childhood in action- a feat no less marvelous to the adult consumer than the idea of capturing an invisible sprite on film.” (17)

“By popularizing snapshot photography as a valuable language in its own right, as a voice of the people in an increasingly mediatized society, Eastman broke the oral/print binary. The snapshot possesses not only the immediacy, transparency, and purity of enunciation associated with oral expression, but also the tangible and archival qualities of the printed document- an enchanted middle ground where the primitive and the modern coexist.” (19)

"The Brownie's Story of the Brownie"

The following excerpt is "The Brownie's Story of the Brownie", from "The Book of the Brownies"(1902), an advertising booklet published by Kodak:

Once upon a time the Queen of the Fairies summoned the Chief of all the Brownies to her presence. "Good Brownie," said she, "for many years you have served me faithfully and well, and I now grant you one request- your heart's desire." Bowing low the Brownie pondered but a moment and then replied: "Give to me that which will bring back pleasures past and double pleasures present- that I may bestow it upon my earthly friends, the children." Waving once her magic wand, the Fairy Queen placed in the waiting Brownie's hands a box.

"Speed you back to earth again, and in a city near the great inland seas, you will find a man having power over light and darkness. Give to him this box, that he may reproduce it for the benefit of your children friends- all you ask for, and more, the box contains."

With box secure in his tiny arms the Brownie vanished and by means known to Brownies soon placed the box in the hands of the man by the inland seas.

As all good children know, mortals must heed the behest of the Fairy Queen, and so the magical box was reproduced again and again and scattered over the wide world wherever Brownie bands were found, to whisper in waiting ears the secret of the pleasures in the little black box.

This is the Brownie's Story of the Brownie- the little camera that has afforded pleasure and education to thousands of children and grown-ups the world over.