- It is possible that Kodak cannot pay his debt and survive
- The 137 -year -old company has been fighting for years
- Has had a great impact on photography, and in this author
Travel five hours north of New York City and you can visit Kodak’s house; Or more properly, the property of George Eastman in Rochester, the birthplace of Kodak, and what is increasingly similar to his final resting place.
The iconic 137 -year -old photography company is now in real danger of closing forever, although it would forgive it if I thought that happened more than a decade ago when the company with difficulties first requested bankruptcy protection.
As a photographer for a long time he began to roll at Kodak Standard and Kodak Ektachrome Film, I considered a walk through the Eastman house similar to the trip to Cooperstown for a baseball fan.
Kodak, some would argue, brought photography without help to the masses, producing simplified cash cameras that asked for little more early fans that “press the button, we do the rest.” That campaign helped to provoke a revolution that was possibly as transformative as the most recent in smartphone photography.
In the first part of the twentieth century, Kodak had numerous series of popular cameras, including the classic and very square brownie, but was probably the instamatic of the sale of 70 million units that put a camera on almost all.
Kodak achieved a 1973 version of a meme when his popular film stock, Kodachrome, inspired a 1973 Top-10 success by Paul Simon, one that seemed to exalt the virtues of the film:
“Kodachrome
They give us those beautiful bright colors
Give us the greens of the summers
It makes you think that everyone is a sunny day, oh yes. “
I missed much of Kodak’s early history (no that old), but I grew up with a photographer who bought a movie and paperk paper in bulk and built a dark room in our apartment closet, NY, the apartment dressing room.
Naturally, I caught the insect, and at the university I was building my own dark room bedroom and buying a Kodak movie in giant rolls that allowed me to turn my own 35 mm boats (and save on what typically was the cost of $ 5 of a single kodak movie roll).
Honestly, I think Kodak stumbled for the first time when he did not respond to Polaroid. The last company made its name for the first time in the 1960s with instant photography, producing the terrestrial camera line that allows it to get the finished impression (it only had to apply a thin polymer layer so that it essentially fix and protect the image).
After the Polaroid SX-70 arrived (the first instantaneous camera reflex), Kodak lately delivered its own instant chambers, but they were never sold as well. Polaroid, meanwhile, has gone through its own tribulations, including bankruptcy in 2001 and the resurrection in 2020 with a completely new line of instantaneous cameras.
More than 30 years have passed since the dawn of digital degree photography to the consumer, but none of the companies had a lot of response to their arrival, perhaps believing, as many professional photographers did, that digital would never be such a good film.
When I visited the George Eastman Museum, Kodak’s Gloria days had disappeared. Consumers, the people who led the original Kodak business, had passed to the next easy photographic platform: their smartphones. Few people these days travel with dedicated cameras, much less based on films; As photographers like to say, “the best camera is the one you have with you”, and most of the time that is your phone
Perhaps Kodak can comfort yourself with the fact that today there is an even easier way to create lasting memories that do not require movie or lens: AI. Instead of aiming at a camera to a person or scene, he simply dreams of a warning or feeds on an image, presses a button, and the AI does the rest.
Ironically, Kodak’s possible disappearance occurs as well as generation Z is showing fascination with analog film photography, although most recognize that this flirt will be short duration. There are no one -hour photos these days, and if you want a film roll to develop, you may have to drive at a distance or send it by mail somewhere. In addition, there is the cost: a kodak 200 film roll could cost you $ 10, and develop it could cost $ 25.
I would like the reason why some people adopted the cinema again were due to an appreciation of Kodak and what it has done for the art of photography, but something else is in operation here, and it has to do with a return to the joy of anticipation (waiting for a week to see how their photos are) and the simplicity of the analog exchange (eliminate a stack of photos and share them with a friend who can only comment on his face) that outfit).
Kodak could survive this last round of bad fiscal news, but it is clear that we will never return to when the movie was dominant and all who sang Kodachrome I knew what Paul Simon was talking about.
