Études Photographiques, 30 | 2012 the Cavalcade of Color 2
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Études photographiques 30 | 2012 Paul Strand / Kodak / Robert Taft versus Beaumont Newhall The Cavalcade of Color Kodak and the 1939 World’s Fair Ariane Pollet Translator: James Gussen Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/3486 ISSN: 1777-5302 Publisher Société française de photographie Printed version Date of publication: 20 December 2012 ISBN: 9782911961304 ISSN: 1270-9050 Electronic reference Ariane Pollet, « The Cavalcade of Color », Études photographiques [Online], 30 | 2012, Online since 02 July 2014, connection on 01 May 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ etudesphotographiques/3486 This text was automatically generated on 1 May 2019. Propriété intellectuelle The Cavalcade of Color 1 The Cavalcade of Color Kodak and the 1939 World’s Fair Ariane Pollet Translation : James Gussen EDITOR'S NOTE An earlier version of this article was presented at the one-day conference ‘Le Spectacle de l’industrie / Exhibiting Industry,’ organized by Claire-Lise Debluë and Anne-Katrin Weber at the Centre des sciences historiques de la culture at the University of Lausanne on June 1, 2012. The author wishes to thank Jesse Peers, study center archivist, George Eastman House, Lori Birrell, manuscript librarian, University of Rochester, Kathy Connor, George Eastman legacy curator, Joe Struble, archivist, George Eastman House Photo Collection, and Olivier Lugon for his rigorous and inspired rereading of the text. 1 Kodak did not become the world’s leading photography company on the strength of its products alone; it also pursued an aggressive marketing and advertising strategy. Its real accomplishment was using that strategy to establish photography as a privileged medium of consumer society ‘by creating and then capturing a large-scale amateur market.’1 The economic logic was simple: Kodak lowered its prices, increased its production, and guaranteed its profits through a system of patents that quickly gave it a virtual monopoly. Rooted in technical innovation and the internationalization of the marketplace, its marketing was essentially organized around a single powerful idea: the passage of time. The camera becomes its guardian; it freezes the moments, preserves their traces, and reactivates the memory of them. Remembering soon became such a powerful theme that it ultimately gave an almost ritual character to the act of taking a photograph, which could capture human life from birth to death. In order to achieve this, the company had to create a need; it had to persuade consumers to see their everyday life Études photographiques, 30 | 2012 The Cavalcade of Color 2 as an event, divesting it of its banality so as to multiply the occasions for using their cameras. 2 Kodak’s marketing strategy relied on a complex web of press advertisements, stores, and exhibitions, with world’s fairs representing the high point. An analysis of the latter, combined with a history of the company’s advertising and slogans,2 presents an effective approach to studying the negotiations that surrounded photography’s first emergence as a consumer medium. Prints were used extensively at these expositions, both inside the pavilions to showcase the products, and outside to highlight the fanciful design of the sites through the distribution of booklets or postcards extolling the fairs. The ultimate aim was to convince visitors to follow suit by capturing the spectacle of these grandiose yet ephemeral events in their own photographs. Thus, the presence of photography at fairs was hardly accidental. Indeed, in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair, it caused serious tensions with a profession that sought to defend itself against competition from a growing amateur community encouraged and supported by the photography industry. These debates reproduced in microcosm the conditions that were creating conflict between market regulation and the rise of unfettered capitalism. 3 The promotion of amateur photography took on a new dimension with Kodak’s presence at the 1939 World’s Fair. The launch of a new colour process, Kodachrome, gave the firm an opportunity to try out its strategies of persuasion. With the help of a structure as logical as it was spectacular, Kodak developed an immersive exhibition environment designed to amaze and impress its visitors. Immersed in the universe of the brand, prospective customers explored its history and tried out the new cutting-edge technologies. But the process of persuasion didn’t stop there. On the one hand, Kodak managed to appropriate an entire aspect of the World’s Fair by turning the experience itself into something to be photographed: the spectacular promotional pavilions themselves became occasions for photographs and the creation of visual souvenirs. Not merely a sales tool, advertising now became a subject in its own right and a means for directly stimulating the production of souvenir photos. At the same time, the official quality of these events gave an almost political function to that advertising, a phenomenon which Kodak openly exploited in 1939, seeking to cast the use of its products and the production of souvenir photos as a civic duty or patriotic gesture. In each case, the spectacularization and monumentalization of the most everyday forms of amateur photography is evident, symbolized by the highlight of the pavilion, the giant slide show the Cavalcade of Color. 4 Situated at the nexus of mass industrial production and the booming phenomenon of leisure, the photography trade show reflected the emergence of a market culture. How did the system of access to photography equipment become established? What mode of distribution was encouraged? What role did expositions play in the marketing of photographic processes? This essay will address such questions, while refocusing attention on an exposition that is now largely forgotten. Exhibiting the Kodak Brand 5 In 1888, the Eastman Dry Plate Company – it became the Eastman Company in 1889 and the Eastman Kodak Company of New York in 1892 – celebrated its tenth anniversary by entering the new age of marketing. Until then, a good product was supposed to fill a need and was expected to sell itself. Going against this principle, the company’s founder, Études photographiques, 30 | 2012 The Cavalcade of Color 3 George Eastman, enlarged his marketing and advertising strategies, starting with the coining of the word Kodak itself.3 Eastman made no secret of his ambition: ‘The manifest destiny of the Eastman Kodak Company is to be the largest manufacturer of photographic materials in the world, or else go pot. As long as we can pay for all our improvements and also some dividends I think we can keep on the upper road. We have never yet started a new department that we have not made it pay for itself very quickly.’4 With this confidence in the future, Eastman created his advertising department, intended to boost the brand’s image and professionalize its operations; Lewis Bunnell Jones became its manager in 1892. The department was given an annual budget of $750,000, the largest advertising budget in the world at the time, and charged with developing a complex set of strategies to stimulate the consumers’ desire to buy. 6 With a firm belief in the power of advertising, Kodak had been active in the field of photographic illustration as early as 1901, as soon as technical improvements in halftone screening made it possible to achieve a satisfactory standard of quality.5 In addition to his press campaigns, Eastman set up an international network of specialized stores to spread the brand’s name and move its stock of mass-produced goods. In 1885, Kodak established a wholesale office in London, opening its first store there a year later. In 1889, the Eastman Photographic Materials Company, Ltd., was formed to coordinate sales outside the United States from the English capital. From then on, dozens of branches sprang up in England, France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe.6 On the basis of this international network, Lewis Jones also developed a bold marketing campaign involving a series of travelling trade shows. Designed to appeal to his clientele of amateurs, the exhibitions were primarily made up of state-of-the-art cameras and prints selected at competitions. To add a bit of interest to the lists of anonymous participants, some celebrities were invited to present their photographs as well: in England, Queen Alexandra; in the United States, the photographers Alfred Stieglitz7 and Edward Steichen. The first of these, the Eastman Exhibition, opened on October 27, 1897, at the New Gallery in London. Following an international competition open to amateurs specifically using Kodak equipment, a jury consisting of professional and amateur photographers as well as a representative of the photography industry made a selection of prints from among the thousands submitted. All were then elegantly arranged by a newly hired scenographer, George Walton.8 According to the magazine Amateur Photographer, the result was ‘the biggest and best thing ever done in this country in the way of photographic exhibitions.’9 Attendance, as estimated by Kodak, reached twenty thousand in the space of just three weeks. On the strength of this success, the exhibition travelled abroad to the National Academy of Design in New York the following year, where the number of visitors was estimated at no less than twenty-six thousand.10 7 Kodak continued to exploit the medium of the ‘exhibition,’ expanding it to reach a larger and larger area. Between 1905 and 1910, exhibitions crisscrossed the United States by train, while in 1904 the Grand Kodak Exhibition was transported by truck from city to city throughout the British provinces11. The presentation consisted of a slide show, a demonstration film, and forty-one panels, thirty-eight of prints and enlargements and three of technical equipment. The exhibitions required large venues, concert or meeting halls such as the Washington Artillery Hall in New Orleans or the Peabody Hotel in Memphis (both in 1906).