Pictures — How to Make Them
Chapter One (excerpt)
My new book, Pictures — How to Make Them will be available on a chapter-by-chapter basis on iTunes. Below is an excerpt from the first chapter.
Why are we so fascinated with photography?
There’s no getting around it, people love to take pictures. Photography is the democratic medium, and has been ever since the Kodak Brownie hit the scene back in February of 1900. The Brownie was affordable and easy to use. The first model cost a buck. You’d shoot your pictures and Kodak would do the rest. It was cheap and easy to use. So much so, that Kodak marketed it, and their optional do-it-yourself processing kits, to children. The Brownie made it possible for everyone, not just devoted professionals, to be a photographer.
Before the Brownie (or Eastman’s earlier camera, called the Kodak), most people would have had just a handful of pictures taken of themselves throughout their entire lifetimes. These photographs would have been made by a professional photographer, probably in a studio, and, because of technical limitations, in a quite formal way. Every photograph was a big deal. That all changed with the Brownie. Suddenly average people could take pictures of anything they wanted.
