What's wrong with this picture, or lack of same? Or more to the point, what's wrong with this ad? It's an advert for Kodak film and it has no pictures! It's from the World's Work of 1910... a magazine aimed at men. Full of important stuff.
Funny, the magazine is one quarter advertising, and all the other ads have pictures. Or at least drawings or cartoons.
You'd think a company this dumb about selling itself would have gone out of business long ago.
Well, no. Kodak lasted the century and today the company asked for bankruptcy protection in the US.
I have a lot of magazines from the 1910 era and many have advertisements for Kodak. One full page ad has two boys skiing, and capturing 'the wonders of nature' on film. There's a pocket Kodak advertised in a 1911 Delineator, I put the pic in my story.Threshold Girl. The protagonist of my story, Flora Nicholson, my husband's great aunt, is flipping through a copy of the Delineator and thinking "Magazines sure make you want things."
The Nicholsons bought a KODAK in 1906, for 5 dollars (a large sum, actually) because it is written in Norman Nicholson's account book. I have accounts from 1883 to 1921 and never is 'Film" written in, so it must have come out of the children's money. They took pictures in the 1910 era, with this kodak, most likely, and many of them are on this website, Flo in the City.
In Marion's 1907 diary, during her summer off from her first year of teaching, she writes about 'fooling around taking pictures'.
It's relatively rare to see pictures of 'ordinary' citizens -casual snaps - from that era. You don't see many on Flickr. But I have quite a few: this picture actually is from the family album and is a detail of a tiny 2 inch photo of Margaret and the girls taking tea outside their house in Richmond, Quebec, with Marion, seated demurely in the corner in her white dress. Photos can be deceptive. Marion Nicholson was anything but demure: she was funny, and active and focused. She became President of the Teacher's Union.
This picture is up on the wall in my new "art deco" bathroom. Facing the water closet, as they called it in 1910. I can 'sit' and watch Marion, my husband's grandmother, have tea in 1910. Don't you think they could have used this photo to illustrate the 1910 World's Work advertisement?
The Guardian, today, in an article about Kodak's demise, said that the company originally advertised to women.
Or Moms, I guess.
Of course, people were wary of early cameras, for every day use. That they would be used for, well, inspecting nature, but of a more intimate kind, not landscapes, that's for sure
I guess this is why this ad doesn't have the picture of a beautiful young woman, the image that through the century has been used to capture the attention of both male and female readers.
Here's the advertisement for the pocket Kodak, from August 1911 Delineator. (I can't find the magazine with the skiing boys. It's somewhere.)
