"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)