A fascinating brief history of the Kodak Snapshot

A fascinating brief history of the Kodak Snapshot

Vox has released one of their typically slick videos about how Kodak coined the term “snapshot.”

Photography enthusiasts will probably be well versed in the history of Eastman Kodak, a photography company that was founded in the 19th century and continues to thrive today. However, that is Vox The video, published on September 20th, is still worth a look.

In it, the video explains that photography was initially a complex, scientific process carried out exclusively by studio technicians. That was until Kodak No.1.

“It was a handheld box camera preloaded with a relatively new, lightweight invention: roll film,” explains senior video producer Coleman Lowndes.

The Kodak No.1 was able to take 100 small circular photos. Once the roll of film was used up, the customer sent the camera to Kodak for processing and waited for the machine to come back in the mail with a new roll and the photos from the last one.

Although these snapshots were not as high quality as those taken by studio photographers, it was the first time amateurs could produce photos, leading to the famous slogan: “You push the button, we do the rest.”

“The casual nature of these photos, made possible by how quickly the Kodak No.1 could capture images, showed people’s natural smiles and relaxed feeling,” says Lowndes. “Compared to the portraits that were previously taken in professional studios and often had longer exposure times and a more formal setting.”

Accordingly Voxa Kodak No.1 cost $25 in the 1890s, which is equivalent to over $800 today – which is out of the price range for most people. But that changed when Kodak released its successor: the Kodak Brownie.

Released around 1900, the brownie cost just $1 (equivalent to $38 today). Unlike the Kodak No.1, the photographer had to load his own film container (which cost 15 cents each), with each cartridge holding six shots. The Brownie came onto the market and by the end of 1905 over 1.2 million cameras had been sold.

The video ends by documenting Kodak’s decline, which culminated in a bankruptcy filing in 2012 while the camera market was fully digital. But like a phoenix, Kodak rose again as analog photography became a passionate hobby again in the 2020s.