- Kodak may not be able to repay his debt and survive
- The 137 -year -old company has been struggling for years
- It had a huge impact on photography – and on this author
Traveling at five o’clock in the north of New York and you can visit Kodak’s home; Or more correctly, the domain of George Eastman in Rochester, the birthplace of Kodak – and what is more and more like his last rest.
The 137 -year -old emblematic photography company is now in danger of closing for good – although you are forgiven if you thought it had taken place over ten years ago when the company in difficulty filed a request for protection against bankruptcy.
As a long -standing photographer who started shooting on Kodak Standard and the Kodak Ektachrome film, I considered a trek of the Eastman house similar to CoopStown for a baseball fanatic.
Kodak, some would say, has brought photography to the masses alone, producing simplified boxes that requested a little more early amateurs other than “you press the button, we do the rest”. This campaign helped trigger a revolution that was undoubtedly as transformative as it is the most recent of smartphone photography.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Kodak had many series of popular cameras, including the classic and very square brownie, but it was probably the instat of 70 million units that put a camera in the hands of almost everyone.
Kodak obtained a 1973 version of a meme when his popular film, Kodachrome, inspired a top 10 of the 1973 top 10 by Paul Simon, who seemed to praise the virtues of the film:
“Kodachrome
They give us these beautiful bright colors
Give us the Greens of Summer
Makes you think that everyone is a sunny day, oh yeah “.
I missed a large part of the history of the first first that Old), but I grew up with a father of a photographer who bought Kodak film in bulk and built a dark room in our cupboard of Queens, NY, apartment.
Naturally, I caught the bug, and at the university, I built my own room room and bought a kodak film in giant rolls which allowed me to run my own 35 mm cans (and to save on what was generally the cost of $ 5 in a single roller of Kodak film).
Honestly, I think Kodak has tripped for the first time when he did not respond to Polaroid. This last company first made its name in the 1960s with an instant photograph, producing the terrestrial camera line which allows you to remove the finished printing (you just need to apply a thin layer of polymer to repair and essentially protect the image).
After the arrival of the Polaroid SX-70 (the first Instant Reflex Camera with a single objective), Kodak delivered his own instant cameras late, but they were never sold as well. Polaroid, meanwhile, crossed his own trips, including bankruptcy in 2001 and the resurrection in 2020 with a brand new range of instant cameras.
It has been more than 30 years since the dawn of basic digital photography, but none of the companies had a lot of response to his arrival, perhaps believing – like many professional photographers – this digital would never be such a good film.
As I visited the George Eastman museum, Kodak’s glory days have long disappeared. Consumers, people who led Kodak’s original things, had gone to the next easy photographic platform: their smartphones. Nowadays, few people travel with dedicated cameras, not to mention those based on film; As photographers like to say, “the best camera is the one you have with you”, and most often it is your phone
Perhaps Kodak can comfort itself in the fact that today there is an even easier way to create lasting memories that require neither film nor objective: AI. Instead of targeting a camera on a person or a scene, you just dream of an prompt or feeding yourself in an image, press a button and AI does the rest.
Ironically, Kodak’s possible disappearance occurs just when generation Z shows a fascination for analog film photography, although most recognize that this flirt will be short -lived. There are no pictures of an hour these days, and if you want a film jet to be developed, you may have to drive an hour or post it somewhere. In addition, there is the cost: a Kodak 200 film could cost you $ 10, and develop it could cost an additional $ 25.
I hope that the reason for which some people kissed the film again was due to an appreciation of Kodak and what it did for the art of photography, but something else is at work here, and it above all has to do with the return to the joy of anticipation (while waiting for a week to see how your photos have been returned) and the simplicity of analog sharing (deleting a pile of photos and can only comment on your face this outfit).
Kodak could survive this last series of bad tax news, but it is clear that we never return when the film was dominant and all those who sang Kodachrome knew what Paul Simon was talking about.
