Friends of Art History Visual Culture Series

“The Eastman Kodak Company in Canada: Shaping networks, shaping consumers”

by Shannon Perry, Senior Photo Archivist, Government Records, Library and Archives Canada

 Within the accepted historiography of photography, the importance of George Eastman and the Eastman Kodak Company (EKC) as revolutionary catalyst in the amateur photographic practice has become unassailable. While the photographic ‘landscape’ and market post 1888 was indeed radically altered, the historiographical dominance of ‘the Kodak story’ has obscured the means through which EKC’s successful technological, industrial and advertising strategies surrounding the EKC-attributed ‘snap-shooter’ operated.

This talk explores the idea that the changes effected by Eastman and the EKC began not with imaging desires, but with Eastman’s acknowledgment of, and profound understanding of, the existing and competing interests within the photographic industry in Canada pre-1900. By tracing the interactions between the various communities and objects which have constructed our current understanding of this period, new avenues for study of photography as part of a global cultural and economic movement are exposed.

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