“It was bigger than just saying, ‘Hey, buy my brand.’ It was ‘invest in this way of doing things.’ “ It was a relentless advertiser, promoting its products in a range of ways, making “Kodak” a synonym for photography.Įastman “was marketing a product and a process. The “democratization” of photography even helped turn the form into art, as experts sought to bracket off the snapshots of everyday amateurs from the aspiring work of aficionados, she adds.ĬNNPhotos: Kodachrome collection looks back at midcentury America

“It made photography commonplace, from the Brownie (camera) through its many variations,” says Joan Saab, who teaches visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. These days, its most coveted assets are its patents for digital imaging – including, ironically, some used in smartphones. But now convenience and technology have taken their toll: On Thursday, the venerable Rochester, New York-based firm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It’s that age of convenience that Eastman helped usher in with his once-ubiquitous company. We can just pull out our phones and get a perfectly adequate snapshot – one without the sharpness and detail of a good 35-millimeter image, perhaps, but we live in an age of “good enough.” After all, those MP3 files on your iPhone are no match for CD quality, either. So Kodak promised back in 1888 when founder George Eastman introduced the company’s first camera.īut that’s the problem, isn’t it? We don’t need anybody to do “the rest” nowadays.

Nostalgia synonym