Kodak MMVII

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I took my first photo when I was about 7 years old. Growing up in Germany of the 1970s, it was not a Kodak moment, but an Agfa moment. Anyway, the object in question was a cat on a field that apparently grasped my attention of my new Agfamatic kamera. Processing was expensive (when you had to pay it from your own pocket money), and I had another 23 pictures to take before I would get the film developed. So, it took a couple of weeks to find out that what I had seen had absolutely nothing to do with what the actual picture looked like. But still, it amazed me that it was possible to keep a moment frozen onto paper.

And that amazement never left me.

Later, when I started more seriously (as in: very interested hobbyist), I was lucky that the German Democratic Republic disappeared. With it it’s own film-making (and incredibly polluting) factory, ORWO. But between those two events, the west German mark bought incredible amounts of the ORWO black&white film. I think I must have purchased a 3-digit number of those rolls. I built myself a little robot, that would develop those film-rolls in batches of 4, thus giving me plenty of freedom to experiment.

While I was unlucky enough to be on a creativity killing high school, I had one teacher who taught photography in his own time. He introduced me to the secret and lonely-fascinating world of the dark room. Thank you, Herr Turek!

Once I got the hang of it and realized that one gets what one pays for, I moved on to Ilford. On an exchange semester at Hull University in England, I was lucky to have a developing machine, that would take a lot of the drag of manually developing paper copies away.

I really first got into touch with Kodak (though I obviously had heard of them before, after all they did spend serious money on advertising) when I went to film school in the mid 1990s London. One could chose between Kodak and Fujifilm. Fujifilm was said to be greenish, but anyway, our camera department had decided for us that Kodak was the way to go. Suddenly I would expose 24 frames within one single second.

Around that time, the digital “revolution” started. DV replaced Super8 and Video8. DigiBeta took over from BetaSP. And with the spread of the Internet, hype about directors shooting feature films on digital formats excited the no-budget-film community. Still, “real” films were shot on 35mm and professional photographers (except for news) also shot on 35mm.

10 years later, and you hardly see anyone taking snaps with a Kodak kamera. Sony and Nokia are the new producers of mass-market cameras.

But the “old” companies are fighting back. They have, after all, a century of knowledge on making machines perfect for capturing images. Arri and Panasonic both have shown that it takes more than marketing to make digital filmcameras suitable for professional film sets. Well, and Kodak? It seems that they are getting back into fighting mode, too:

They are returning to their roots, helping people keep memories. But at the same time finding new markets - such as printers that come with ink that is actually affordable.