PROJECTS
BOOK PROJECT
Picturing Abundance:
Personal Photography From Kodak to Instagram
Picturing Abundance is a book project about the history of personal photography in the United States, tracing the eras of Kodak and Polaroid to the digital image, Instagram, Google, and the smart phone. My aim is to approach this history of personal photography from the late 19th century, when the amateur photographic market begins, through the 20th century with the rise of the instant Polaroid image, to the complex terrain of digital picture taking today, looking at how individuals have used personal photography to shape private and public images of themselves.
Photography’s emergence as a medium for the everyday person in the US begins with Kodak, which began marketing consumer cameras and film in 1888. Kodak dominated the amateur photography market to an extraordinary degree until the emergence of digital photography in the 1990s. The company began by selling photography as a vehicle for leisure, an activity of agency and liberation for young women, from its well-known slogan of “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” to "Take a Kodak with You.” Producing a broad array of pedagogical materials, including instructional pamphlets and booklets and magazines such as Kodakery, aimed at amateur photographers, it then shifted its focus to shaping the role of photography in creating family coherence, with the “Kodak moment” (an orchestrated moment of family togetherness at birthday parties, family celebrations, and holidays) as a key selling point. Kodak not only encouraged picture taking for memory's sake, but actually encouraged consumers to structure their lives with Kodak moments, thus establishing photography as a platform for nostalgia, and defining difficult moments as the unphotographed, the forgettable.
When Polaroid emerged in the late 1940s, it sold amateur photography as instantaneity, and this soon evolved into the selling of photography as the sharing of pictures in social settings, as parties, hipster culture, art, and sex—a long way, in other words, from Kodak's message. Polaroid's advertising imagined the Polaroid consumer as someone who was the center of attention at a party, while they held the developing picture in hand in anticipation of the image. Like Kodak, Polaroid produced handbooks and brochures that constituted a kind of pedagogy of how to think about picture taking, and these positioned the Polaroid as an "ice-breaker" and a means to meet others. Nowhere was Polaroid’s aim for hipness clearer than in its campaign for the aptly named Polaroid Swinger in 1965 which featured the camera as a kind of mod accessory, with a jingle that promised, “It’s more than a camera, it’s almost alive! It’s only nineteen dollars and ninety-five.”
The 1990s gave rise to digital photography and the 2000s to the corporate demise of Kodak and Polaroid. With the subsequent emergence of social media platforms and photo sharing websites, and, most consequentially, the integration of photographic and video cameras into smart phones beginning in 2007, the taking of everyday and personal photographs has been dramatically transformed. This book aims to understand contemporary personal photography and how, in a very short period of time, the kinds, numbers, and values of photographs have changed due to the simple fact that most people usually carry a smart phone (with its digital camera) with them. This means that the legacy of the Polaroid image, which was imagined as primarily about sharing, seems to have triumphed over the concept of the singular Kodak moment. Many of the constraints of 20th century analog amateur photography, such as the consolidation of photo printing, no longer shape consumer activity, awarding more agency to the everyday photographer. Yet, in the age of Google, Facebook, and Apple, images constitute a significant form of data surveillance.
This book will engage with this history through examining the role of the advertising and marketing of the photography and camera manufacturers, and later software programmers, smart phone designers, and social media platforms, in shaping the kinds of pictures people take in their everyday lives and analyzing the images produced by and changing practices engaged with by amateur photographers throughout these different historical eras. It will look at how those practices have actively shaped the construction of public selves, family relationships, memories, social networks, a “data self,” and the construction of personal image archives from family albums and shoebox collections to the vast “archives” of images on mobile phones and photo sharing websites. Key themes will include mobility, abundance, memory, construction of the self, acts of sharing, the mundane, the personal image in public domains, and algorithmic curation.