Out of Focus

In January, Eastman Kodak filed Chapter 11 documents in U.S. bankruptcy court. Its debts exceeded its assets by approximately $1.7 billion. The New York Stock Exchange delisted it. Three weeks later, the company announced that it will stop making digital cameras, camcorders, and digital picture frames some time this year in an effort to cut costs and further reduce its workforce. Apparently Kodak believes there are people somewhere who will still buy whatever it will still be selling at that point, but according to all the experts, the company that created a mass market for personal photography has officially morphed from viable commercial enterprise into picturesque curio, another victim of the Internet’s punishing economies.

Like many other media behemoths that fell before it, Kodak had trouble embracing the notion that the products it had sold effortlessly and profitably for so long would become worthless so quickly. So a few horny geeks had started trading 256-color images of old porn mags on CompuServe. So what? So digital cameras were getting cheaper and more powerful. Who cares? Hundreds of millions of people around the world weren’t going to just stop buying film overnight. “You come back in 10 years, there will be a film business here,” a Kodak executive told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in 2009. Six months later, the company discontinued the last remaining version of its iconic Kodachrome line.

“They were a company stuck in time,” Ryerson University professor Robert Burley explained to Bloomberg News. But if any company should have recognized what 2012 would be like in, say, 1988, Kodak should have. After all, it pretty much invented 2012 in 1888. That was the year that company founder George Eastman introduced the Kodak No. 1, catalyzing a new way of looking at the world, a new mode of existence that would make Kim Kardashian a millionaire and Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire.

As Alexis Madrigal explains at The Atlantic, Kodak referred to this new mode of existence — in which a camera or some other recording device is ever-present; in which making images, consuming images, and other forms of self-documentation and self-curation are major aspects of one’s life — as Kodakery. Unfortunately for Kodak, it wasn’t able to maintain the sort of proprietary hold on this mode of existence that the name suggests. Even in 1888, Kodakery (or as we might more generally call it, snapshot culture) was too big an idea for just one company to control.

by Greg Beato, The Smart Set |  Read more: