Taking Snapshots, Living the Picture: The Kodak Company's Making of Photographic Biography

Abstract

In this article I explore how George Eastman and the Eastman Kodak Company encouraged early twentieth-century camera users to think of snapshots as pictorial biographies. Analysing a wide selection of articles from the Kodakery, one of Kodak's most popular magazines in the first half of the twentieth century, I demonstrate that the company endeavoured to secure its prominence in the photographic market by encouraging members of the public to integrate picture-taking into everyday life, and regard photographs as self-contained repositories of biographical details. To this end, Kodak framed the speedy pace of life that characterised the practice of being in the industrial world as a reality that allegedly weakened the human eye and mind's ability to process the experience of life itself. Introducing the idea of the camera and picture-taking as the ultimate cures for this purported human deficiency, Kodak provided camera users with advice that helped to cement an understanding of photographs as surrogates of both the changing human body and individual subjects’ experiences in time and space. As in popular culture, and sometimes also in academia, photographs are still widely regarded as pictorial biographies, I argue that considering the popular photographic industry's role in shaping photographic practices and photographs’ perceived meanings can help clarify the relationship between photography and life-writing.

Keywords:

• biography
• Kodak
• Kodakery
• photograph albums
• snapshots
• story-telling pictures

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] See, for example, Hurter 13; Sartore and Healey 163; Taylor 5.

[2] See, for example, Adams; Rugg; Stotesbury.

[3] By ‘photography natives’ I refer to individuals for whom photography had already been an integral part of life.

[4] For a discussion of the restrictive representational conventions that dominated popular photo-portraiture in nineteenth-century American photography studios, see, Volpe.

[5] Although Kodak printed other substantial publications, owing to the length of this article I have chosen to focus on the Kodakery as it was the company's longest-lasting magazine. In addition, its visual and textual contents often mirrored the information that Kodak conveyed to non-professional camera users in its other publications.

[6] Otherwise, in average the company offered annual subscriptions for only 60 US cents, two years for one US dollar.

[7] See, for example, ‘A Little Cousin of the Post Card’.

[8] See, for example, ‘The Autographic Kodaks’; ‘The Pictorial Letter’.

[9] Cf. West 177.

[10] Cartoonist Bradford was the nom de plume used by the popular American cartoonist and author Walter R. Bradford in his numerous contributions to the Kodakery.

[11] See, for example, ‘Story-Telling Pictures’ 1915; ‘The Kid and the Cop’.

[12] See also, Rose (25–40).