- Kodak may not be able to pay his debt and survive
- The 137-year-old company has been fighting for years
- It has had a huge impact on photography – and on this author
Travel five hours north of New York City and you can visit Kodak’s home; Or more correct, George Eastman’s property in Rochester, the birthplace of Kodak – and what is increasingly similar to its last resting place.
The iconic 137-year-old photography company is now in real danger of shutting down well-yourself you would be forgiven if you thought it happened more than a decade ago when the fighting company first filed for bankruptcy.
As a long -standing photographer who got off to shoot at Kodak Standard and Kodak Ektachrome movie, I was considering a hike to the Eastman house that looked like the journey to Cooperstown for a baseball fanatic.
Kodak, some will claim, brought on their own photography to the masses and produced simplified cash cameras who asked a little more about early amateurs than “You press the button, we’re doing the rest.” This campaign helped trigger a revolution that was undoubtedly as transformative as the newer in smartphone photography.
In the early part of the 20th century, Kodak had several popular camera series, including the classic and very Boxy Brownie, but it was probably the 70 million unit-selling instamatic that put a camera in almost everyone’s hands.
Kodak achieved a 1973 version of a meme when its popular movie stock, Kodachrome, inspired a top-10 hit from Paul Simon, who seemed to expand the film’s virtues:
“Kodachrome
They give us the lovely bright colors
Give us the green summers
Makes you think the whole world is a sunny day, oh yes ”.
I missed a lot of Kodak’s early story (Geez I’m not to Old), but I grew up with a photography bar that bought Kodak movies and paper in bulk and built a dark room in our queens, new, occasional walk-in closet.
Of course, I caught the mistake, and at college I built my own bedroom dark room and bought Kodak movies in giant rolls that let me turn my own 35mm cans (and save on what was typically $ 5 costs for a single roll of Kodak movie).
Frankly, I think Kodak first stumbled when it did not respond to polaroid. The latter company first made its name in the 1960s with immediate photography that produced the Earth Camera line that lets you pull out the finished print (you just had to use a thin layer of polymer to essentially fix and protect the image).
After the Polaroid SX-70 arrived (the first single-lens Reflex Instant Camera), Kodak delivered his own immediate cameras too late, but they never sold so well. Polaroid, meanwhile, has undergone its own travels, including bankruptcy in 2001 and resurrection in 2020 with a whole new line with immediate cameras.
It has been more than 30 years since the dawn of consumer class digital photography, but none of the company had much of an answer to its arrival, perhaps that, as many pro photographers, did-that digital would never be a good movie.
When I visited the George Eastman Museum, Kodak’s Gloss Day was long away. Consumers, the people who ran Kodak’s original business, had moved on to the next easy photographic platform: their smartphones. Few people these days travel with dedicated cameras, so much less movie -based; As photographers like to say, “the best camera is what you have with you” and more often than isn’t it your phone
Perhaps Kodak can comfort themselves in the fact that today there is an even easier way to create lasting memories that require neither film nor a lens: AI. Instead of aiming a camera against a person or scene, you simply dream a quick or feed in an image, press a button, and AI does the rest.
Ironically, Kodak’s possible death comes, just as Gen Z shows a fascination with analog film photography, although most recognize that this flirtation will be short -lived. There are no hours of time photos around these days and if you want a roll that has been developed, you may need to run an hour away or send it somewhere. There are also costs: a roll of Kodak 200 movie could run you $ 10 and develop it can cost an additional $ 25.
I wish the reason some people embraced films again was due to an appreciation of Kodak and what it is done for the art to photograph, but something else is at work here, and it has mostly to do with a return to the joy of expectation (waiting a week to see how your photos showed that clothes).
Kodak may survive this latest round with fiscal bad news, but it is clear that we never go back to when movies were dominant and everyone who sang Kodachrome Knew what Paul Simon was talking about.
