How Kodak invented the “snapshot”

The original Kodak camera changed photography forever.
Cr: Vox

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In 1888, Eastman Kodak patented roll film, and the company's business model of selling film, and then processing and printing the photos taken on that film for their consumers, made photography available to the masses for the first time. Before the Kodak No. 1 box camera debuted, photography was a complicated process involving chemistry and expertise on big, bulky equipment.

When Kodak introduced the Brownie and sold it for a dollar in 1900, photography went fully mainstream. The company dominated the film sales and development market during the 20th century and successfully marketed its automatic cameras as crucial to capturing fleeting moments — at home and on vacation.

But digital camera sales began to outpace film camera sales in the early 2000s, and Kodak failed to keep up. They filed for bankruptcy in 2012 but do still exist and sell film, albeit to a much smaller market.

Further reading:
Kodak and the Rise of Amateur Photography, by Mia Fineman
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kod...

George Eastman's Modern Stone-Age Family: Snapshot Photography and the Brownie, by Marc Olivier
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40061221

“The Brownie Camera” in History of Photography, by Eaton S. Lothrop Jr.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/1...

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