700
have to do is press a button, and we’ll take care of the
rest,” was the advertising slogan which helped insure the
camera’s worldwide success. It was patented in 1889.
The Kodak was so handy that the most daring kind of
pictures could be taken, completely breaking away
from traditional perspectives, while its much smaller
viewfi nder produced images that were systematically cut
off by the frame, and thus no longer composed. On the
whole, with al few exceptions, it was mainly painters,
who fi rst realized how useful these little boxes could
be, and what the visual possibilities were. They were a
minority: most Kodak users at the time just aimed their
cameras face on at the subject and clicked. In the spring
or summer of 1886, George Eastman selected Paul Na-
dar, son of the just-retired Parisian photographer, as his
agent in France for the new Eastman roll fi lm system.
By happenstance, the editors of Le Journal Illustré at
about the same time asked Nadar to make photographs
of the famous chemist Michel Chevreul in celebration
of the latter’s one hundredth birthday on August 31.
The result was that the younger Nadar used a camera
fi tted with Eastman roll fi lm to record the world’s fi rst
photographic interview for a news publication.
In 1888 the fi rst Kodak camera was created, contain-
ing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5-inch
diameters circular pictures. In 1889 an improved Kodak
camera was made with roll of fi lm instead of paper. Until
the time of Eastman, photography, though already popu-
lar, was still considered too complicated for ordinary
users, and George Eastman is remembered for having
made photography accessible to all.
Eastman started off as a bank clerk, and then became
interested in photography. He is particularly remem-
bered for introducing fl exible fi lm in 1884.
Four years later he introduced the box camera in-
corporating roll fi lm, and with his slogan “You press
the button, we do the rest” he brought photography to
the masses.
The box camera had a simple lens focusing on 8
feet and beyond. One roll of fi lm could take a hundred
images, all circular in shape. The entire camera was
posted to the factory where the fi lm was processed
and the camera re-loaded and returned to the user, the
charge for this being a few dollars. The photographs had
a diameter of about 65mm, and opened up a new world
for popular photography.
Eastman’s contribution not only made photography
available to all, but also resulted in a gradual change in
what constituted acceptable photography.
Popular in the Victorian times was stereoscopic pho-
tography, which reproduced images in three dimensions.
It is a process which popularity waxed and waned—as
it does now—reaching its heights in the mid-Victorian
era.
During the 1880s the press played a leading role in
the social movement, which brought the harsh realities
of poverty to the public’s attention. The camera became
an important instrument of reform through the photo
documentary, which tells the story of people’s lives in a
pictorial essay. It responded to the same conditions that
had stirred Courbet and its factual reportage likewise fell
within the Realist tradition. Before then, photographers
had been content to present the same romanticized image
of the poor found in genre paintings of the day. In 1870,
when he was twenty-one, Jacob Riis emigrated from
Denmark to New York and spent the next seven of those
American depression years going from job tot job often
hungry, and once walking all the way to Philadelphia
to seek a job from a Danish family he knew. The inven-
tion of gunpowder fl ash allowed Jacob Riis to rely for
the most part on the element of surprise. Riis became
a police reporter in New York City, where he learned
fi rst-hand about the crime-infested slums and their ap-
palling living conditions. He kept up a steady campaign
of illustrated newspaper exposés, books, and lectures
which in some cases led to mayor revisions of the
city’s housing codes and labor laws. His photographs’
unfl inching realism has lost none of its force.
In 1887 he became informed on the advantages of
taking photographs by fl ashlight. In practicing and doing
so, he became America’s fi rst celebrated photojournal-
ist and its fi rst social documentation photographer. He
soon produced a visual record, which clearly achieved
the impression he had long sought to make on the New
York community at large. With the publishing of his
book, How the Other Half Lives, in 1890, he single-
handedly altered American society’s perception of the
term Social Justice.
In the 1880s the Pictorialist movement grew in Great
Britain and the United States, where photographers con-
centrated on the artistic dimension of the medium.
England was the birthplace of Pictorialism, a move-
ment created by experienced amateurs at the turn of the
twentieth century. They felt that photography deserved
to be given the same recognition as great art, as original
prints has been. Two Englishmen founded the move-
ment: Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson.
The former published Pictorial Effect on Photography
(1869), from which the movement derived its name. This
hugely successful work was translated into French in
1885 under the title The Artistic Effect on Photography:
Advice for Photographers on the Composition of Art and
the Use of Light and Shade. As an artist, Peach Robinson
made photomontages by bringing together negatives into
a single print, a technique that never became popular
with the Pictorialists.
The photographer and polemist Peter Henry Emerson
a distant cousin of the American philosopher RalphHISTORY: 7. 1880s