In one corner of a shelf in my room is an album of uniformly bad photographs. Some are out of focus, some are jerky and some are blurred to an extent that even the photographer would be hard put to recognise the subject. But I like leafing through the album still and can’t conceal a smile at the blurry image of my father trying to balance a glass of beer, while trying to fly a kite, my mother breaking into one of her characteristic guffaws, paying scant attention to the guide trying to describe 6th century historic relics. The pictures bring back memories of a family vacation, which, unknown to us then, was going to be our last in a long while.
But for the photographers’ abject lack of skill, the album could have contained what the Online Slang Dictionary describes as “a moment worthy of capturing with a photograph, especially an adorable moment”. It’s a description of a phrase coined in an era when dictionaries were rarified commodities with no place for slang and the online world was decades away, it's a description of a Kodak moment.
Armed with a Kodak point-and-shoot camera, my sister and I cared little for photographic niceties on that trip. The camera had a fixed-focus lens and came with the sales pitch: “You push the button, we do the rest”. There was no need to focus. For three generations of people who loved photography or wanted to have fun with film with no pretense of photography skills, the Kodak film released from the plastic Kodak cylinder and fed into the point-and-shoot cameras was heaven sent.
The Kodak moment will become a thing of the past with Kodak filing for bankruptcy last week. Some see the downfall as an obstinate company's failure to keep with the times: a company that relied on photochemistry falling by the wayside in an era of megapixels.
The analysis is only partially correct. For the early steps in digital photography were taken in Kodak's labs in Rochester in New York. In 1975 Kodak engineer Steve Sasson created the first digital camera, which took photos of a resolution of 10,000 pixels—about a hundredth of the resolution that low-end camera-phones have today.
And over the next two decades, Kodak patented numerous digital technologies, many of which are built into the digital cameras of today (a trove of more than 1,000 patents could be Kodak's last clutching straw today). In 1995 the company brought its first digital camera to market. And for a while, the blazing growth of camera sales helped blunt the effects of Kodak’s fast-fading film revenues. Kodak was the leading camera seller in the US till the early 2000s.
But Kodak always made its money in film and chemicals; everything else was just a side business. However, today, the photography market isn’t what it used to be even about 10 years ago. In Kodak’s heyday, photo buffs took pictures with a Kodak camera on Kodak film which they went on to process on Kodak paper. The digital age does not lend itself to such monopoly. Today there are camera manufacturers, and memory-card manufacturers, and printer companies, and photo-sharing sites.
And then there are mobile phones, which not only helped murder Kodak's digital camera business but threatens to cannibalise every other manufacturer of cameras for amateur photographers—ironically Kodak still holds the patent for the technology which enables cell phone cameras to recognise colour. Carrying a mobile phone with a camera is a far less cumbrous than meandering around with a typical camera. Some of the biggest breaking news stories of 2011—from the capture and killing of Gaddafi to outbreaks of looting in the UK's summer riots—were captured on camera phones. At a musical gig at an amphitheatre one is likely to be confronted by a forest of arms holding phone cameras aloft. Diners in restaurants greet the arrival of their food with a few excited clicks of their phone.
Of course, purists complain about the quality of the picture. But who cares. Like my sister and I on that memorable vacation, people having fun with their mobile cameras are only interested in capturing what the Online Slang Dictionary describes as an “adorable moment”. Not a Kodak moment any more, though.
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