Kodak snapshots
Peepholes into some of the first candid photography
Alex Q. Arbuckle
c. 1890
You press the button, we do the rest. - Kodak marketing slogan
For more than half a century after its invention, photography was the exclusive domain of professionals and skilled enthusiasts, requiring bulky, expensive equipment and extensive training to capture and develop an image. That changed in 1888 with George Eastman’s creation of the Kodak camera. The device was a wooden box covered in leather, small and light enough to be carried by hand. Inside was a roll of film with enough room for a hundred photographs. To take a picture, one needed to simply turn a key to wind the film, pull a string to set the shutter, point the lens in the direction of the subject, and press the button. When the film in the camera was exhausted, the user mailed it back to the factory, and a few weeks later received a fully reloaded Kodak and prints of the camera’s distinctive 2.5-inch snapshots, which were cropped to circles to eliminate the edge distortions caused by the simple lens. The release of the Kodak and the easy, candid photos it produced marked the beginning of popular photography as we know it.
