BROWNIE
The proliferation of amateur snapshot photography
and its impact on contemporary society in the twen-
tieth century can be traced to pivotal developments
in both camera technology and the marketing of the
medium to the masses at the end of the nineteenth
century. Entrepreneur George Eastman (1854–
1932) began his career in banking but soon turned
his budding interest in photography toward profes-
sional ends, founding the Eastman Dry Plate Com-
pany (later Eastman Kodak Company) in
Rochester, New York in 1880. While at the fore-
front of the manufacture of dry plates in the United
States, Eastman realized photography’s cumber-
some equipment and processing requirements was
daunting for potential users and strove to introduce
a radically simplified process. Although the paper
roll film holder Eastman soon devised (along with
other manufacturers) helped to supplant the dry
plate negative, the small ‘detective’ camera he first
equipped with this new type of film in 1886 was still
too complicated and expensive to achieve broad
success in the marketplace. By 1888, Eastman cre-
ated a new version of the hand-held roll film cam-
era—a small wooden box fitted with a simple lens
and loaded with film capable of recording 100 cir-
cular images, 2½ inches in diameter. The name
Kodak was coined for this latest manifestation of
the hand camera—chosen by Eastman for the
authoritative look of the word’s two letter ‘Ks’
and for the ease of its pronunciation in various
foreign languages. Yet the widespread success of
this camera can be attributed to neither its catchy
name or even wholly to its innovative film format,
but rather to Eastman’s groundbreaking marketing
of the total photographic endeavor.
In addition to being simple enough that ‘‘any-
body, man, woman or child, who has sufficient
intelligence to point a box straight and press a but-
ton’’ could make successful photographs, the pre-
loaded Kodak camera was returned intact after the
exposures were made to the Eastman Company for
development and printing and was finally sent back
to the customer re-loaded and ready for use (East-
man in Coe and Gates,The Snapshot Photograph
[1977] page 17). Eastman’s ingenious marketing
strategy, encapsulated in the company’s slogan,
‘‘You press the button, we do the rest,’’ and laid
the foundation for a widespread democratization of
photographic practice in the decades to follow
(Ford,The Story of Popular Photography[1989]
page 62).
Yet the Kodak camera was still relatively expen-
sive—at the cost of $25 in 1888, it was well outside
the range of many, and by 1898, the Eastman Com-
pany introduced a less expensive, easy-to-operate
camera aimed at further broadening the pool of
amateur photographers. This simple box camera,
called the Brownie, was devised by Frank A. Brow-
nell, who had designed and manufactured cameras
for the Eastman Company since 1885 and who
would be its chief camera manufacturer until 1907.
The Brownie was made of wood and jute board with
an imitation leather covering and was equipped with
a simple fixed-focus lens and rotary shutter. It was
capable of producing successful exposures in rela-
tively strong sunlight with subjects in focus from
several feet to around 100 feet. The Brownie had
no viewfinder but was marked with V-shaped sight
lines on the top of the box which aided, when held at
waist level, in aiming the camera toward the subject.
The Brownie was pre-loaded with roll film, and
yielded six 2¼-inch square images per strip, which
could be tracked through a built-in red indexing
window. At the cost of $1.00 (film included), the
Brownie did indeed satisfy the demand for a mark-
edly less expensive camera accessible to the amateur
practitioner. With developing, printing, and mount-
ing of prints equally affordable at $0.40, sales of
the Brownie camera soared, reaching more than
100,000 cameras by the end of 1900.
By 1910, approximately one-third of all Ameri-
cans owned a camera—that many of these were
Brownie cameras must be attributed to a significant
factor beyond its technical simplicity—namely
Eastman Company’s deliberate marketing of the
new camera to children, both through a barrage of
advertisements and in the very naming of the cam-
era itself. Brownie was very much a household word
in turn-of-the-century America before becoming
the name of Eastman’s latest camera. It described
a type of small elf culled from popular legend to
occupy the pages of author and illustrator Palmer
Cox’s children’s stories. First published in the juve-
nile magazine, St. Nicholas, the brownies wereBROWNIE