A few days ago, I was walking around the George Eastman Mansion in Rochester, NY, blissfully unaware that Facebook was preparing to buy Instagram for $1 billion. I loved the tour. Eastman and his company, Kodak, turned early photography, an incredibly a cumbersome and rarified process in the mid 1800s, into a portable, easy-to-repeat consumer obsession.
Today, the obsession continues but largely without Kodak, which is now mired in bankruptcy. In its place is, I guess, Instagram, the $1 billion-dollar baby.
I still haven’t decided if I’m happy that Facebook bought the digital photography app and social network. I am an Instagram user, although I was not an early adopter. I think I first noticed it when I saw some shared images on Twitter that reminded me of old Instamatic photos.
That was clearly the appeal of Instagram: the ability to take everyday digital images from your iPhone’s camera (now Android, too!) or photo library and apply a filter that made the picture look like it was taken by a camera that Kodak (or Polaroid, for you Land Camera fans) made more than 50 years ago.
Hipsters everywhere instantly adopted Instagram as their own. Every Instagramed photo was somehow more authentic, like the act of adding a filter made the image hand-made. That’s not what really happens, of course. Instagram’s filters, although there are a bunch of them, do not change from image to image. That jagged edge on the “Kelvin” filter will look the same on one photo after another. But the effect is still quite good. These pictures look like you developed them yourself.
That’s particularly rich, of course, since most people using Instagram today probably don’t even know what I’m talking about. Certainly, most Instagram users have never developed their own negatives or printed their own pictures. (Yes, I have, but that’s another, very long story.)
Still there’s a thread of connection between what Eastman did — delivering photography from the pros to the every man by inventing roll film and a camera that could shoot with it — and what Instagram has done: taken something that took time and expertise (photo filter application), and given average consumers the ability to make beautiful (some might say artistic) photos and share them to, potentially, millions with the press of a virtual button.
On the other hand, there would be no Instagram without Eastman and Kodak. Even the Instagram logo is similar to a classic Kodak Instamatic camera—though I don’t know that Instagram has ever paid a dime to Kodak.
The Eastman museum displayed a lot of Kodak’s early cameras and related photography equipment, but no Instamatic that I could find. Although the camera arrived nearly 30 years after Eastman’s death, it helped solidify Kodak’s position in the “photography-for-everyone” pantheon. Clearly, the easy-to-use, low cost, and very portable camera influenced the Instagram team.
As I looked at the remarkable innovation and sometimes quirky (a camera gun?) applications of photographic technology at the Eastman House, I couldn’t help but be a little depressed. Eastman’s genius launched two industries: photography and movies. He had become one of the richest men in the world and believed money could move mountains — or at least homes.
He once had his own mansion split in half and had the two sections moved apart by 10 feet so he could enlarge the conservatory. The work cost $775,000 in the early 1900s. Today’s Kodak would no doubt have other, more pressing needs for the that money.
As Kodak works its way out of Chapter 11, it’s obvious that the company held onto traditional photography as the centerpiece of its business for, perhaps, a little too long. Yes, it was one of the first to introduce a digital camera, but Kodak and its customers seemed to believe traditional film photography would never die.
Too bad Kodak couldn’t have seen as far ahead as Eastman once was. Maybe it could’ve come up with the idea of Instagram and today Facebook would be buying it, instead. That’s a fantasy. The reality, though, is that Facebook and Instagram probably do owe Kodak something — maybe a debt of gratitude. Without Kodak, there would be no Instagram and I bet Facebook would be a much duller place, too.
What do you think? How important was Kodak’s role in the development of digital photography and applications like Instagram that use it?
1860 Folding Camera and George Eastman on right
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