Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Thank you Kodak for making the simple, affordable cameras that allowed America’s working class to capture the last half of the 20th century for their grandchildren.

My Aunt Mabel died about a week before Christmas 2011. She was 85 and died from the affects of a major stroke.

We attended her funeral in the southwest Louisiana town of Jennings. The funeral service began with a slide show, a music video of photographs that her children had scanned and set to music (thank you iPhoto or similar software).

The photographs were simple family remembrances. Many of them had turned a generation of yellow. The were the format, size, shape of the Kodak Instamatic camera and the 110 film. Kodak made these cameras and film for working class people. They really couldn’t afford a 35mm camera or the film or the processing fees. They never dreamed of having a dark room and developing their own film.

The generation of my late aunt had one photograph of themselves as a child and a few high school senior photos. That was it for their depression-era childhood. After surviving the depression and WW II, they had their own families. Their kids, me, were captured on the affordable Kodak cameras like the Instamatic with its 110 film. Their young grandkids were captured on similar cameras loaded with disc film. The operation was simple, the printing inexpensive at Photo-Mat and K-Mart, and yes, they turned yellow in the daylight, but held their color if kept in the dark of end table drawers.

The photographs recorded working class life in America for the second half of the 20th century.

Kodak is in trouble as a company. They didn’t make the shift to digital photography fast enough. That is a shame as they invented the digital camera. I doubt that Kodak will be making cameras and film in any format in 2020.

Kodak made lots of money off my parents and aunts and uncles. Kodak also allowed them to save what we looked like for several decades. For that recording of history and of our families, I thank Kodak.