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- Kodak may not have the ability to pay down its debt and survive
- The 137-year-old firm has been struggling for years
- It’s had a big impact on pictures – and on this writer
Travel 5 hours north of New York City and you may go to the house of Kodak; or extra correctly, George Eastman’s property in Rochester, the birthplace of Kodak – and what’s more and more wanting like its remaining resting place.
The iconic 137-year-old pictures company is now in real danger of shutting down for good – though you would be forgiven when you thought that occurred greater than a decade in the past when the struggling agency first filed for chapter safety.
As a longtime photographer who received his begin taking pictures on Kodak normal and Kodak Ektachrome movie, I thought-about a trek to the Eastman House akin to the journey to Cooperstown for a baseball fanatic.
Kodak, some would argue, single-handedly introduced pictures to the lots, producing simplified field cameras that requested little extra of early amateurs apart from “You press the button, we do the rest.” That marketing campaign helped spark a revolution that was arguably as transformative because the more moderen one in smartphone pictures.
In the early a part of the twentieth century, Kodak had quite a few fashionable digicam sequence, together with the basic and really boxy Brownie, nevertheless it was in all probability the 70-million-unit-selling Instamatic that put a digicam in virtually everybody’s fingers.
Kodak achieved a 1973 model of a meme when its fashionable movie inventory, Kodachrome, impressed a 1973 top-10 hit by Paul Simon, one which appeared to extol the movie’s virtues:
“Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
Give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah”.
I missed a lot of Kodak’s early historical past (geez, I’m not that previous), however I grew up with a photographer dad who purchased Kodak movie and paper in bulk and constructed a darkroom in our Queens, NY, residence’s walk-in closet.
Naturally, I caught the bug, and by faculty I used to be constructing my very own bed room darkroom and shopping for Kodak movie in large rolls that permit me spin my very own 35mm canisters (and save on what was sometimes the $5 price of a single roll of Kodak movie).
Honestly, I believe Kodak first stumbled when it failed to reply to Polaroid. The latter firm first made its title within the Sixties with immediate pictures, producing the Land digicam line that allow you to pull out the completed print (you simply needed to apply a skinny coat of polymer to basically repair and shield the picture).
After the Polaroid SX-70 arrived (the primary single-lens reflex immediate digicam), Kodak belatedly delivered its personal immediate cameras, however they by no means offered as properly. Polaroid, in the meantime, has gone by travails of its personal, together with chapter in 2001 and resurrection in 2020 with a whole new line of instant cameras.
It’s been more than 30 years since the dawn of consumer-grade digital photography, but neither company had much of a response to its arrival, perhaps believing – as many pro photographers did – that digital would never be as good a film.
By the time I visited The George Eastman Museum, Kodak’s glory days were long gone. Consumers, the people who drove Kodak’s original business, had moved on to the next easy photographic platform: their smartphones. Few people these days travel with dedicated cameras, let alone film-based ones; as photographers like to say, “the best camera is the one you have with you”, and more often than not that’s your phone
Perhaps Kodak can take comfort in the fact that today there’s an even easier way to create lasting memories that requires neither film nor a lens: AI. Instead of aiming a camera at a person or scene, you simply dream up a prompt or feed in an image, press a button, and the AI does the rest.
Ironically, Kodak’s possible demise comes just as Gen Z is showing a fascination with analog film photography, although most acknowledge that this flirtation will be short-lived. There are no one-hour photos around these days, and if you want a roll of film developed you might have to drive an hour away or mail it somewhere. Plus, there’s the cost: a roll of Kodak 200 film could run you $10, and developing it might cost an additional $25.
I wish that the reason some people were embracing film again was due to an appreciation of Kodak and what it’s done for the art of photography, but something else is at work here, and it mostly has to do with a return to the joy of anticipation (waiting a week to see how your photos turned out) and the simplicity of analog sharing (taking out a stack of photos and sharing them with one friend who can only comment to your face about that outfit).
Kodak might survive this latest round of fiscal bad news, but it’s clear that we’re never going back to when film was dominant and everyone who sang Kodachrome knew what Paul Simon was talking about.
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