The Fate of an Interesting Photography Mogul – ‘KODAK’
It’s highly likely you might’ve heard the name or learnt of it through a photo studio if you’ve come across one to get your photos developed . In 1888, Eastman trademarked the name “Kodak”, a meaningless word which would soon develop a definition on its own and rapidly become one of the most recognisable brands in the world. To accompany the trademarked name, Eastman developed and released a Kodak camera which was loaded with paper film of 100 photos. And so was born the amateur photograph.
By 1897, the company had patented a pocketable camera. By 1900, they had released the ‘Brownie’, a basic cardboard box camera with a simple meniscus lens that took 2 1/4-inch square pictures on 117 roll film – The Brownie functioned so quickly and easily that the word ‘snapshot’ was born.
In 1969 Kodak produced the camera used by astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission which was used on the surface of the moon. The first ever photo of Earth taken from deep space was captured by Lunar Orbiter I with Kodak hardware.
However, despite essentially inventing the digital camera, the company didn’t focus its efforts enough on digital photography and were rapidly overtaken by other brands such as Nikon and Canon.
Yet despite its fall from grace, we have Kodak to thank for enabling even the most amateur of shooters to become great photographers, and likewise for some of the most beautiful images of the 20th century.You don’t just learn plain lessons in equipment handling at ARTE but also get to discover and unearth the history and stories behind the massive developments in the world of photography.
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