Remember when we all got to enjoy our summer vacations not just once but twice?
The first time was when we traveled somewhere to a campground, a historical landmark or the annual family reunion and picnic. But the second time came a week or so later when the vacation photos arrived in the mail from the processing lab. We couldn’t wait to open the envelopes and packages. It was like blowing out candles on a birthday cake. Only this time, all our wishes had already come true.
Sometimes the glossy prints seemed grander than the original moments. There were the “group shots” in front of monuments or famous landscapes; the picnic tables full of relatives; the highway scenery shots out of the moving car’s window; lots of swimming pool photos; and, always the new babies. Also mixed in with the posed images were usually a few surprises from a quick shutter click or an “oops.”
The stack of photographs in the envelopes made the memories more vivid — and more permanent. The wait was always worth it. With a little time passing between the end of a trip and the unpacking and moving forward into the rest of the season, the photos offered us a perfect “still frame” of our life’s most cherished moments.
Most of the time we anxiously passed the stack of photographs between us. But sometimes we got treated to a slide show with a projector and a screen or blank wall. This made some of our captured moments way bigger than life. These were popcorn moments!
Where did they go?
Look at us now. Have you also discovered how life is not structured to be lived by tweets, bleeps and digitized screen captures? We need our Kodachrome images. Life needs long moments, slow pauses and not so many conditioned impulses where we mindlessly click on our phone camera or scan its screen. And talk about fleeting or missed memories. We all know the Cloud is no substitute for the old family scrapbooks — but who remembers where we put those? And, how many digital printouts do you have taped to your refrigerator door?
Do you remember your family’s first camera? Was it a Kodak Brownie or maybe a Polaroid? Some of us had more advanced 35mm cameras made by Leica, Minolta or Nikon and some of those had changeable lenses. For some of our summer vacations, we probably all toted some of those cardboard disposable cameras or a compact Kodak Instamatic.
History of pictures
George Eastman offered his first Kodak cameras for sale in 1888. The price was $2. The most popular Kodak camera, The Brownie, was introduced in 1901 and versions of the boxy rangefinder camera were manufactured into the 1960s. (It was a Brownie camera that captured the famous moment of The Titanic crashing into an iceberg.)
The history of photography reaches all the way back to 1717 when curious tinkerers and artists made blurry silhouettes with candlelight and smoky paper. Louis Daguerre developed the daguerreotype process in the 1830s, the first publicly announced and commercially viable photographic process, using a pinhole-type camera and metal negative plates. At the more near end of the history of photography, Fairchild Semiconductor invented the first digital cameras in 1973 with just 100x100 pixel resolution. (Today’s phone camera’s are 14,000 times more precise.)
Eastman’s big contribution was his invention of dry gel paper, otherwise known as light-sensitive film. His Kodak company virtually re-invented life with the introduction in 1935 of the color film, Kodachrome. (Yes, now we can all sing along to the Paul Simon song: “Kodachrome; They give us those nice bright colors; They make us the greens of summer; Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day.”) Alas, Kodachrome film was discontinued in 2007.
How much history would we remember without the moments — grand or small — captured through the lens of a camera? The earliest “news” photographs were taken in 1853 during the Crimean War. How many of our lessons about our own Civil War were learned from looking at the grim silver gelatin prints by Mathew Brady, including the harrowing death scenes at Antietam and Gettysburg?
Just last week, astronaut Bill Anders died at age 90. His photo during the Apollo 8 NASA mission in 1968 of the “rising” Earth above the Moon’s horizon has been considered “the most influential environmental photograph” ever taken.
Anders and his partner astronauts Jim Lovell and Frank Borman snapped a series of photos on Christmas Day 1968 with their cameras as they orbited the Moon at close range. Most of the shots were pointed down to the Moon’s rocky surface. But Anders looked up and was startled by the blue globe of Earth wrapped in white clouds. He quickly changed his camera to color film and shot his “Earthrise” image.
Just like us on our summer vacations, the astronauts had to wait until they landed back on Earth and the NASA laboratories processed their images. Anders’ photo was printed on the cover of TIME magazine, on Earth Day flags and T-shirts and on the cover of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue.
Other single photos also have lasted through time and now define whole decades, generations and historic turning points. Just a few include: Dorothea Lang’s black-and-white photo titled “Migrant Mother” that captured the human toll of The Great Depression; the World War II photo in 1945 of five soldiers raising a U.S. flag at Iwo Jima; the 1969 wide horizon shot of the horde of muddy concertgoers at Woodstock; the contrasting image taken nine months later of a lone grieving female student kneeling over a shot student protestor at Kent State; and, another lone figure from 1989 of a man standing defiantly in front of a long line of military tanks in China’s Tiananmen Square. (We’re sure you have your own favorite historical photos in mind.)
No more archives
All of the photos mentioned above appeared in the pages or annual pictorial reviews of LIFE, Look or Saturday Evening Post magazines. Copies of these and other historic photos now are preserved in museums and public art galleries. We worry about how our more recent history and changing generations are being recorded and preserved — or not. Historical chronicles like LIFE magazine and thousands of newspapers are now gone. (We fret about how many photojournalists have been put of jobs.)
The mail no longer delivers packages of photographs to us anymore. We don’t have Kodachrome slides or Fujicolor prints to pass around. We can share digital photos on Facebook or pass our phones back and forth, but then the images are gone. Lots of people have hundreds and even thousands of photos cached on their cell phones. But they don’t know how to convert them to permanent memories or paste them in a family scrapbook.
It is very sad and richly ironic that all of us walk around all the time with a camera (phone) in our pocket. Never before in history have we had the technology and capacity to capture every moment of history and our personal lives. And never before have we failed so greatly to archive these most important and cherished moments.
The medium of memories
Photographs have always been our modern culture’s medium of memories and most visual form of communication. Let’s just say it, going digital has not been good to our culture. Eastman’s Brownie camera was a “democratizing” tool for everyman, allowing working families and all others to chronicle their own lives and pass on memories, milestones and meanings from generation to generation to generation.
Before the digital world of the Internet, social media, the Cloud and smarter and smarter phones, the technology of photography was quite simple. All it took was a box with a lens and a shutter to capture light on film. Photography used to be called “painting with light.” We’re not so sure that’s an apt description for our modern digital photography.
One big problem is that digital technology is constantly changing and not getting any less expensive. There is almost no emphasis on archiving. We all think of the Cloud — the favorite method for storing all our photos — as being free and unlimited. But the Cloud is not free and it also is not as friendly as we might think. The only way any of us get to view or retrieve our photos and other files stored on the Cloud is when Google, Microsoft or Apple lets us or wants us to. You should keep this in mind.
In times before we were all living in our Digital World, our cameras, the loaded film and the local camera store or pharmacy were all we needed to wander wherever we pleased and capture photographs.
With film, we were forced to pre-think each photographic opportunity. Even black-and-white film was not cheap. We’d take our trusty Minolta, Nikon or Canon 35mm SLR (single lens reflex) camera and look through the small viewfinder, trying to frame an image or setting.
Most of the cameras had built-in light meters and some later models did automatic settings. For best results, we’d carefully adjust the lens’ F-stop that opened or closed the iris lens opening. Then we’d pair our light setting with a shutter speed. Sometimes we needed to stop some action at a ballgame or “freeze” a fast moving object. And sometimes we adjusted the settings for special lighting or added depth of field.
Some of us got extra good at taking photographs and some of us even had makeshift darkrooms for developing our own film and printing photos suitable for framing. We learned the best elements of photography that extended beyond just a sharp focus, but also a sharp “eye.” This included looking for patterns, un-busy backgrounds, captured expressions, dramatic angles and “just right” cropping.
Nowadays, we grab our phones with an automatic impulse and half the time we click its button without even looking at the screen. We are conditioned to believe that the phone’s camera is smarter than us and whatever it captures, is good enough.
And, maybe that is also how we treat all our newest and next memories, too, with just a “whatever.”
And, that would be a waste of Kodachrome film.
— Rollie Atkinson
6-14-2024
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Ah…. the good old days remembered well!
I have a few old photos from my youth and that's enough. People take too many, in my opinion, photos today. It demeans the art form. Besides, who wants a photo or video record of their youthful indiscretions?
I miss Polaroids. We used to take Polaroids of the Trick or Treaters that came to our house on Halloween and hand them to the kids and parents. That's all gone just like Kodachrome and Technicolor film.
Maybe the American Indians were right when they said that cameras were spirit catchers.