Book Review

Canada and the United States

Snapshot photography may be ubiquitous in contemporary popular practice, but serious attention to its history is far too rare. Nancy Martha West's engaging and well-documented book, however, provides a lively and imaginative study of George Eastman's brilliant marketing of Kodak cameras. By focusing on advertisements from the first Kodak camera in 1888 through the 1930s, West creates an interdisciplinary context for the snapshot's transformative influence on American culture and consumerism. Kodak did nothing less, she persuasively argues, than help to shape our culture's ability "to see, to remember, and even to learn" (p. xv).	1
In the preface, West admits a private motivation: snapshots symbolize a reclamation of her own father's loss. Nostalgia, she writes, is both her point of view and her critical subject. Then, by analyzing stages in Kodak advertising, West touches on salient themes in American history. Documenting Kodak's accent on ease of use, simplicity, and playfulness, she proves Eastman's marketing genius.	2
In chapter two, we learn of Kodak's vital link to bourgeois leisure, vacations, automobiles, and the rise of amateurism through ever more effective advertising campaigns. Of particular interest is West's research on the "Kodak Girl" (also discussed later in the context of the "Vanity Kodak" and fashion), who perfectly matches the contemporaneous New Woman. The Brownie, introduced in 1898 at a price almost everyone could afford ($1), finally served, West writes, to fully democratize the camera. Linking the Brownie with nostalgia, modern conceptions of childhood, and toys, West further explores crucial American ideals.	. . .