04.16.2010
So I’m going to nerd out today. One of my favorite books while in grad school was Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia by Nancy Martha West. It was all about the history of the US through a camera lens with an emphasis on advertisement.
What was probably the most shocking piece of information that I learned is that one of the major reasons someone took a “photo” of someone was to document the person’s body (because they had died and more on that later). Before the “camera” there was the daguerreotype that would take a photo of someone; however, it took a really long time. Individuals would have to sit still for something like 15+ minutes. You can find daguerreotypes of people (both living and dead) as early as the 1840s, but they’re all very stiff, no smiles or anything (even the live bodies). These photos were purely for documentation purposes. By the Civil War, actual cameras were being used but they still took time to take a picture and, to some degree, one could argue that it was still all about documentation. The Civil War was the first war to be photographed and everything was included, the living and the dead.
It’s not until the post-Civil War, when the Industrial Revolution really took off, where the camera’s use begins to adopt a different function. I think I talked the other day about family and the structure of family changing during this time where women were choosing their partners and marrying for love and families were having fewer children.
It’s at this time that we slowly start to see advertisements focus on children and Kodak, the first company to develop cameras, quickly realized the children’s market. The Brownie was developed at the turn of the 20th Century and it’s so fascinating to see the change over time in how the ads target children. The following ad, like most ads at the time, uses words more than images to sell the product unlike what we see today (where images are used instead of words).[1]
Nine years later, you still have a lot of print, but now there are actually people in the ads and actual children, holding the different camera models that Kodak built.[2]
What I found fascinating was comparing and contrasting the beginning days of photography with daguerreotypes where images were taken of the dead, especially of children, to about the early 1900s when the camera was all about taking a snapshot of an image of a happy moment and one that was intended to remind of that particular happy moment. We would often wrestle with questions such as Why do we take photos at parties and not at funerals? And, if we’re taking photos of only one aspect of our lives, do these photos accurately tell the story of who we are?
Ok, so how does this relate to children in my context? I have looked through photographs of my mom when she was younger in an attempt to understand her better as a whole person. There are parts of my mom’s life that she doesn’t share with me (and, most likely my sister) and, as I’m sure anyone can relate, I want to know what kind of a person my mom was as a child and young adult, etc. I think just like teens filter stories to their parents, our parents filter stories to us. So if I’m looking at photo albums of my mom and her family while growing up but the albums are filled with happy memories, doesn’t that make it easy for one to conveniently forget that there were any rough times? Doesn’t it make it easy to conveniently forget any of the difficulties that come with an alcoholic in the house? Taking the albums at face value, it underscores the very notion of how we constantly seek perfection in our lives. By only seeing smiles and parties and other good times, we present a skewed version of our lives.
There are some friends of my husband’s who documented the birthing process of their son from the beginning of her contractions all the way through her giving birth. Looking at the photos of the mother grasping on to a pillow as she went through a contraction, I actually thought of how cool it was to see that. We’re not presented a one-sided view of the birth such as seeing her all smiles holding her baby once it’s all said and done. We’re given the dark, painful side of giving birth as well.
In the end, we can never be presented with a 100%, accurate view of something whether it is a positive or negative. And I think this is because of the very nature of experience. My experience of an event will differ from someone else’s. I can verbalize my feelings of the experience (and only to a certain degree) but it’s never going to replicate someone else’s. And the very fact that I can look at a photo from 15 years ago and not recognize people or barely remember the reason for the photo (if at all), I think, proves that while a camera can serve as a glimpse to a memory, the moments that make up our lives are just that. They’re just moments that can never truly be captured.
That concludes my lesson and my nerding out, and I now put down my professor hat. You get an A for listening/reading.
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