"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)