Monday, December 28, 2015

Kodakery

Kodakery, a monthly magazine for amateur photographers first appeared in 1913. Single copies cost five cents, and a dollar would get you a two-year subscription. While the publication was clearly a vehicle for advertising Kodak products, it also contained a lot of useful information for the photo enthusiast. Each issue was twenty-five or thirty pages in length, with about equal space allotted to text and photo reproductions. The design and layout of the publication was spare and elegant.

There were technical articles in Kodakery aimed at the advanced amateur on subjects like film and print processing. Most of editorial content, however, was less demanding, and focused on how best to compose pictures of subjects likely to be of interest to the average person who was mostly interested in recording events and scenes of daily living. Portraits of family members, pets, and children got attention in every issue, as did subjects like garden flowers, travel, sports, marine and snow scenes. While many of the published photos had a rather bland look by today's standards, all were technically excellent and clearly made by people who were advanced amateurs or professionals. None of the featured photographers, however, were big-name artists of the time.


A couple pages at the magazine's beginning and four or five at the end were typically devoted to advertising – only for Kodak products. The company's capacity for technical research, camera making, and a near monopoly on film production gave it tremendous market leverage. Marketing was conducted through franchises to small shops like drug stores and photo equipment specialty shops, and was supported by expertly coordinated advertising campaigns in Kodakery and elsewhere. Kodakery ads seemed to exclusively feature domestically made products from the massive Rochester, NY establishment. However, though it was not apparent in the pages of Kodakery, the company very early on also was engaged in developing overseas markets and production capabilities, an effort which included the acquisition of promising innovative companies like the Kodak A.G. Dr.NagelWerk in Stuttgart which developed the stunningly successful 35mm film cassette. The end result for Kodak was an industry-dominant position very much resembling that of Microsoft or Google today.

Pictures of children, pets and women engaged in idyllic domestic activities were most likely to find their way onto Kodakery's covers. The children were sometimes pictured wielding cameras - a clear allusion to the Kodak message that it made photography easily accessible to anyone. Women were also frequently shown using Kodak cameras to record family life. The magazine also featured frequent shots of smiling young women in dramatic poses, wearing stylish clothing at the beach or in some exotic location like a cruise liner. Those same images, resembling fashion shots, over time became very prominent in Kodak advertising presentations.


Kodakery, Volumes 1-12 can be found on line at the mcnygenealogy site along with other Kodak publications.  Beginning in 1943 the "Kodakery" title was used for the in-house publication for Kodak employees.

(This article was originally posted on my web site.)

Monday, December 21, 2015

progress

So, I went to my local used computer guy and bought a not-new laptop running Windows 7 so that I could run the Blurb book creation software.  Not exactly state of the art, but it looks like it will do the job.  Also picked up a $25 19-inch monitor today so that I can see what I'm doing.

After years of putting my photos on line on my blog and my web site I see that I have a lot to learn about producing images for print.  It is a sobering experience, but not without reward.  I've worked through most of the issues with Photoshop at this point.  Now, I'm looking at learning some new things about layout and fonts, along with rethinking some ideas about why and how I make my images.  It is nice to have a project to work with.

Wednesday, December 09, 2015

Moving along

My vintage camera web site is set to go off line at the end of 2015.  Much of the information is duplicated in this blog which will remain available.  While I could easily reconstitute the web site at some time in the future I am more inclined to revisit some of the images and ideas via new media opportunities such as photo books, ebooks and exhibits.  I'll post notes here on any progress in that direction, as well as reporting on my collateral investigation into the question of whether or not old dogs can learn new tricks.

I have some preliminary findings that I can report now:

1. Retailers continue to ask outrageous prices for digital printer ink.

2. Blurb has announced that it will no longer support my XP operating system.

3. There are some interesting new programs for the black and white digital printing, one such being a shareware utility called QTR that does quite a bit better job of tonal control and producing color neutral prints than Photoshop.

4.  Recent visits to Albuquerque photo galleries have revealed an accelerating proliferation of schlock art in ever-larger sizes on shiny metal surfaces with all the subtlety of  late-night used car advertising.