THE BACK COUNTRY

Back stamps and design on cartes de visite and cabinet cards.

 “Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.”

Walt Disney

For some people, the pleasure in collecting cartes de visite and cabinet cards lies entirely on the reverse, in the stamps that identify the studio and sometimes advertise the range of services. This is understandable. The images on the other side are often commonplace and uninteresting while the back carries an intricate design that can also be a code. This stamp on the back of a cabinet card from the Phebus studio in Constantinople is dominated by Apollo, the god of the sun and of light – AKA Phoebus Apollo - an obvious choice for a photographic studio. Apollo could also be a god of truth, which again makes sense for a photographic studio, since that was what they purported to offer. Note the idealized Ottoman script at the top and the French Photographie. Without knowing who runs the studio we can tell from the French that he was Armenian, because French was the lingua franca of the Armenia business community in Constantinople. Sure enough, Phebus was run by Boğos Tarkulyan, one of the better known photographers in town around the turn of last century. The Art Nouveau pattern was a deliberate nod to contemporary ideas in Western Europe, identifying Tarkulyan as someone less, or even not, interested in Ottoman traditions. The choice of flower in the frames at the top would have been conscious too. It may be amaryllis, which has some connection with Apollo, but that’s only a guess.

 

 The study of the backs of CDVs and cabinet cards is a branch of iconography, specifically one that can trace its origins back to the frontispieces found in books from the sixteenth century through to the beginning of the nineteenth. The frontispiece could be a declaration of intent or an acknowledgement of a patron’s greatness but were never just random images. It was intended to be read in minute detail and required knowledge of biblical imagery as well as more demotic symbols. By the 1860s, when this carte was produced, the art and meaning of frontispieces had fallen out of use but Theophile Gastonguay evoked them with the image of a beaver. Although the beaver did not become the official emblem of Canada until 1975, it had been commonly used as a symbol of Canada since the seventeenth century.

 

 Archibald McDonald ran a photography studio in Melbourne throughout the gold rush. Like every other studio photographer in Melbourne at this time he came from another country, from Nova Scotia in fact, just a spit away (in Canadian distances) from Theophile Gastonguay. You might wonder why St George and not a kangaroo but there we see the difference a century and a half of colonization can make. Although by the 1860s people around the world recognized the kangaroo as Australian, it wasn’t a national symbol. Australia (AKA “The Colonies”) didn’t have such a thing, or if it did it was likely to be St George’s dragon, which, like Australia, was proudly British. Archibald McDonald: logic tells us he was of Scottish background and he might have been the type to give a Glasgow kiss to anyone who called him British, but St George here doesn’t stand for England so much as a landmark in Melbourne. Long gone now, once upon a time everyone in Melbourne knew where St George’s Hall was.

 

 A similar thinking may have been behind Louis of Paris’s depiction of the Porte St Martin, which then as today was close by the central shopping district. Firstly it told customers the studio was located in one of the more salubrious areas, and then it told them how to get there. Notice it was opposite the Theatre de l’Ambigu, a place made famous by Louis Daguerre’s set designs.

Migevant’s studio may not have been at such a desirable address as Louis’ but no Parisian had to ask where the Place de la Bastille was. When this CDV was produced in the early 1870s there couldn’t have been too many people around who remembered the Revolution and the storming of the Bastille in 1789 but enough would have recalled the glorious revolution of 1830, which the July Monument seen here honoured. Essentially the French replaced one monarch with another, which is a little like stumbling from one failed relationship with a drunken philanderer straight into another. Today the Boulevarde Beaumarchais is lined with shops selling antique cameras.

The back stamp can be evidence. In 1876 Alfred Mayman took over the Temple Photographic Gallery at 170 Fleet St in London. Two years later the City of London dismantled the Temple Bar on account of Fleet Street needing widening and the structure was dilapidated. The sections were carefully stored and in 1880 Henry Meux bought it and reassembled it on his estate in Hertfordshire. In 1984 it was bought back from Meux’s descendants and re-erected in Paternoster Square. All this to say that there was only a two year period between 1876 and 1878 when there was any practical purpose for Mayman to have an illustration of the structure on the back of his CDVs. We don’t need any other information to date the image.  

 

 Images of cherubs with cameras are common, as is the inclusion of an artist’s palette, but what does it mean? Strictly speaking, these round and flabby infant creatures are Putti: cherubs have several heads and bits of eagle and lion attached to them. The precise symbolic meaning of the Putti is not understood but since the late Renaissance they have had an association with the arts, and music in particular. Originally the true artist had his muse, a goddess, who inspired him and for whom he created. The little toddlers might have been intended to suggest the playfulness every serious artist needs but also, babies were the inevitable result of creative coupling. In the way that a red and blue barber’s poles once indicated a place to have a bit of bloodletting and these days means a haircut, Monge, and every other photographer who used the imagery saw it as an icon not a symbol.

 

 Just to reinforce the point (somewhat), we find exactly the same image on the reverse of a CDV by a studio located on Rue de la Sabliere. The companies that printed the blanks for CDVs usually have their name in small letters down the bottom. We don’t get any such on either Monge or the Sabliere studio card and while we could assume the same company produced the blanks, it is also possible that several bought their designs from another source. Somebody could have produced this image of the putto, sold it on to the printers who then customized it for the various studios who used them.  

 

This palette is also very common, with a fairly obvious interpretation although it ought to be pointed out that few commercial photographers thought of themselves as artists in the way that people used that word even in the relatively staid 1860s. ‘Artist’ was a kind of password for quality of technique rather than ideas. Apart from being a photographer, Camille Benoit was an art dealer, so he may have seen the image as a pun. 

 Harrison Nathaniel Rudd ran his studio in Costa Rica around the turn of last century, as board mounted photographs were giving way to postcards. Costa Rica was relatively prosperous and peaceful at this time, meaning an American could operate a studio with some confidence it would not be closed down or he would have to get out at short notice. This rather elegant design may have also come from a template customized to his requirements. Or not. There is a pun here as well, in the idea of the woman’s hand holding out a carte or cabinet card. A camera is depicted at the top of the crest.  Maybe Rudd also had cartes with the same back design that the hand holds out.

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THE BACK COUNTRY

THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD

Edwardian era fashion postcards 
“Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”

Coco Chanel

 I have been informed, politely and otherwise, that I am unqualified to discuss fashion. It is true that when the words ‘fashion’ and ‘photography’ appear next to one another a yawn needs stifling. It is the least interesting genre, one reason being that it is so pervasive. It is one thing to encounter fashion photography in the cosmetics department at the local pharmacy, another when it turns up in hardware stores, as though using this power drill will bestow some kind of glamour upon us. Also, the genre has run out of ideas. People speak of a golden age of fashion photography that lasted from 1920 to the 1950s, which was a long time ago now.

 

 This ‘golden age’ began with technological processes that made it possible to reproduce photographs to a high standard in magazines. Previously they had to rely on line drawings. It coincided with the rise of Parisian fashion houses such as Chanel, the diffusion of modernist principles in photography and suffrage for women, which shifted the balance of power so they were not just portrayed as elegant but having authority as well. But if we look to the years immediately before, we discover that the most important medium for transmitting the latest ideas about fashion was the common postcard.

 

 What made the postcard special was that it was cheap, intended to be sent, and also collected. Typical messages on the backs of these postcards from the first two decades of the twentieth century are: “What do you think of this?” (meaning the costume) or: “Here’s another for you”, meaning the recipient – inevitably a young woman - collected fashion postcards. With the popularity of postcards, studios were pumping them out so someone in Paris could send a postcard to someone in London, who got that season’s fashion tips hot off the press. If her mother was relying on Tatler for fashion advice, she might have to wait weeks for what her daughter received in a few days.

 

Another advantage postcards had over magazines was that they could be hand-coloured. Fashion advice from the era places a lot of emphasis on colour; gowns and robes are not merely green but chartreuse; burgundy is in; vermilion is out. Japan had been a source of inspiration for European designers since at least the 1880s. Japan meant delicate, which itself meant pastel shades rather than bold colours. When Hermann Kiesel’s studio photographed this model, it most likely received specific instructions on what shades of ink to use. 

Despite the postcard publishers promoting fashion, labels are rare to non-existent on the postcards, suggesting that the designer didn’t matter. We know that in the 1910s the fashion house was still emerging as a distinct force but another explanation for the absence is that the outfits on postcards weren’t strictly haute couture but copies. Department stores in New York imported fashion items from Paris but they also copied the designs. If a broad-brimmed hat complete with ostrich feathers and silk bands direct from Paris cost too much for anyone but the wealthy, most middle class women could afford an accurate replica. Also, the market for the postcards belonged to young, unmarried women. We know that because on the back the cards are usually addressed to Miss or Mlle Someone. Actual haute couture was out of their reach financially, and also maturity-wise, since that was supposed to arrive with the debutante ball, or if they couldn’t afford that, marriage.

 

Which brings us to that borderline between fashion and erotica. The frontier has always been vaguely marked out, given that one is often an intrinsic element of the other, and there are postcards that make us wonder whether the real attraction was the fashion or the impertinence, but young women were supposed to have thresholds. They might have gone for the flapper look, with the cloche hat and the woollen outfit. Showing the suspenders however was perhaps too indecorous. The risk of sending a postcard like this to a friend is that the parents could find it, so casting her in their eyes as an immoral vixen. It isn’t the evidence of the suspenders that would have necessarily caused offence but the woman’s posture. In fashion, a woman’s expression could be sultry, provocative or downright lubricious but her physical pose was always supposed to be demure. 

 In 1931 Jeanne Jullia of France won the Miss Europe beauty contest. Some time later it was discovered that in the 1920s she had posed nude for Julian Mandel, the infamous and mysterious producer of erotic postcards. The revelations created a minor scandal but they were handled with more savoir-faire than they would be today. She was not stripped of her title, bundled off to rehab or made to grovel before the press, probably because a sullied past was nothing to get excited about in 1930s France; everybody had one. As with the designers, the women who appeared in these fashion postcards were unnamed but look at enough postcards and certain faces become familiar. Usually they were actresses or singers without the status to warrant a caption. Although some women worked as professional models the job was so poorly paid it was something they’d do on the side. Like acting, it was still a disreputable occupation for a woman but at least in the theatre she could redeem herself by becoming a star. 

 This card was sent to Mlle Sarah Parent at 1197 St Catherine St Montreal on April 25 1907 and asks if she can still come to the theatre that evening. (Mail was commonly delivered three times a day back then, which is why you can find postcards mailed from Brighton to London arranging to meet that afternoon.) A Sarah Parent turns us in the Quebec records as born in 1893. If this is the same Sarah, she fits the profile. At fourteen she would be going to the theatre with friends and have an interest in fashion. Notice that the girl in the photo is only a few years older, about eighteen; in other words, a suitable role model. This was sent at the height of the fashion postcard era. That ended with the First World War. It wasn’t so much that the war created a break in the culture but that the customers grew up. Post war, Sarah Parent would be twenty five, possibly married and if she were still interested in fashion she would be turning to the magazines that were aimed at older women. Like the extravagant Edwardian hats, fashion postcards belonged to the past.

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THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD

NIGHT AND THE CITY

Cities by night

“The night is tonight,

tomorrow night...

or any night.”

Voiceover at the beginning of Night and the City (1950), directed by Jules Dassin

You can bet that within days of the daguerreotype becoming public in 1839, someone mounted a camera on a tripod and tried to take a view of Paris by night. We will never see the results of that because it was guaranteed to turn out a failure. The exposure time would have been nearly impossible to calculate but it could have run into the hours, and one reason for that was because in 1839, Paris, like every other city in the world, was not lit above street level. All those 19^th century images of Montmartre pavements lined with nightclubs come from much later. There are accounts from the 1880s and 1890s, when electric lighting first appeared, of near miraculous revelations when for the first time people could see the city lit at night above pavement level. It was as though a veil had been lifted. There was a whole world of architecture above them they had never seen before. Well, they probably had. When thunderstorms crossed the city and lightning streaked across the sky they caught glimpses of it. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how young opiated poets in their garrets could look out at that scene and be overcome by a great philosophical terror.

At 9:30 pm on June 6, 1904 Fred Judge took this photo from the harbour at Hastings. According to the azimuth for that year, the sun had set about an hour and ten minutes earlier. It became one of his earliest postcards and also one of his most popular. He would later estimates sales around the 10 000 mark. He would also produce another version a year or so later that was printed darker and with the lights coming from the windows at the right burnt out. This however is the one that matters. In 1904 most photographers, let alone mere viewers of photography would have found a scene like this technically difficult. The exposure settings were too variable to capture that precise moment when the lightning arced across the sky and illuminated the wharf. Judge probably took several exposures during the stormand this was the one that worked best. It is a perfect composition, taken with the rule of thirds in mind so wharf, sea and sky occupy roughly equal space. Even the position of the gas lamp under the lightning and the interruption of the railings at the bottom look like details he had visualised before pressing the shutter. No doubt this is a scene that generations of Hastings residents had witnessed every summer but never been able to capture. It does not express the power or the terror of nature so much as our endless curiosity about it.

When it comes to postcards of city streets at night, Fred Judge was the master of the form in the early years of the medium. Others produced postcards of cities at night in the 1910s but no one captured the shadowy atmosphere better. His very first London postcard, taken in 1909, was a night view. As was his second and third; this one. I don’t know how familiar he was with London but my guess is he had read enough Sherlock Holmes stories to get excited by the shadows and fog. In 1924 Judge would publish a book; Camera Pictures of London by Night. The images are much more vivid and also Pictorialist, what we might call ‘late Pictorialist’; a term guaranteed to frighten off the photo historians who categorize Pictorialism among that long list of 19^th century English mistakes that include eugenics and the sundry King Georges. I must say, having read his introduction to the book and looked at the photos, he was a great photographer and a terrible writer, but the point here is that we have an image many photo-historians would classify as proto-modernist. In fact, we would say that for a lot of his postcards. He likes the shapes and patterns created by the night. In some the scene is taken up by a looming silhouette that is only just defined.

I’m stuck for identifying the exact process used in this card. I used to assume any intensely blue photograph was a cyanotype and when I became aware that there were several other possibilities I also realized I didn’t have the time to track all of them down. I know there was a process called Delft Blue Toning, which I assume was selenium based. Does it matter? Only as a point of personal pride. I have one other very similar to this in appearance that was taken for the Exposition des Artes Decoratifs in 1925, so I am assuming this is contemporaneous. In 1922 young Georges Simenon arrived in Paris set on becoming a writer (though according to his more tiresome boasts, he had other things on his mind). He is credited with somewhere in the vicinity of 300 (plus) novels, but in effect he probably wrote five and recycled their themes and motifs ad nauseum. This is a scene straight out of one of them. Imagine a drab office clerk standing across from the Olympia one evening in 1925 and deciding, sur l’impulsion as it were, to just throw off his present, very ordinary life, walk into the Olympia, strike up a conversation with a young coquette and see where that takes him. Months later his bloated corpse is dragged out of the Seine but, Mon Dieu, what a story it has to tell.

Let’s leave Europe and head to Reno, circa 1940s, where the city never sleeps. Having spent some years researching the Nevada Photo Service, I would like to say this looks like one of Lawrence Engel’s but since he put a form of company signature on most of his and it isn’t here I can’t. We can say it is post-1931; the year Nevada legalized gambling. There is a stark difference between street scenes pre and post 1931, mostly to do with the proliferation of neon. But the date doesn’t matter so much as the enchantment of this card. It beckons you in to Reno. Never mind that tomorrow morning your wallet will be empty and your self-respect will be shot to pieces; tonight, everything you want is here.

Another image that could come from the Nevada Photo Service, yet cannot. The Doghouse, Harold’s, the Bank, the Palace: there is too much for one person to take in one night, which is of course our photographer’s point. In the 1930s Walker Evans took a photo like this that has rightfully been recognized as significant in his canon yet as images like this show, others had the same ideas. Well, that’s one of the great things about photography: there are no geniuses but there are people who see things more clearly and there are others who look at them the same way. Today downtown Reno is a travesty; the glamour at street level this photographer drew from has largely disappeared and what little remains has been overwhelmed by monolithic hotels. The enduring image is of dozens of military veterans standing at the one-arm bandits for hours on end. America packs them off to Iraq, then it sends them down to Reno. A decent oncologist would advise the country to stop eating its own shit. But another resilient image comes when you leave North Virginia St, look one way to the Sierra Nevada and another towards the desert and realize there aren’t many cities more perfectly sited. Depressing as downtown might be today, a big part of Reno’s allure in the past was the journey out to it, across the mountains or through the desert, arriving at a fabulous oasis, a pleasure garden where there was too much fun and no time for sleeping.

To Pendleton, Oregon, which depending on your criteria is either a city or a town, best known for its annual rodeo. The point this photo demonstrates is that viewed the right way at night it can look as exciting as any capital on the eastern seaboard.  If someone in Hollywood had rewritten Dassin’s Night and the City and set it in Pendleton, this could be the opening scene. In a few seconds we’ll see Harry Fabian running out of the cinema and glancing anxiously behind. For that matter it could just about be a still from Orson Welles famous opening scene in Touch of Evil. Pendleton might be small but once the sun goes down it packs in a lot of action.

A snapshot taken at the 1933 Century of Progress Expo in Chicago. The tower at the right would be part of the skyride. The lights emanating out of it are attached to the cables. Like a lot of expo architecture the world over, it was considered a marvel of technology but once the fair was over it was dismantled. There is no reason to think this isn’t an amateur photo though it’s worth noting that apart from one detail in the middle foreground that could be a person running the place looks deserted. Possibly it was taken by a worker before the fair officially opened. Like every other photo here (excepting possibly the top one, which is a negative print of a map) it shows how the whole appearance and atmosphere of a place changes at night. It becomes somewhere else.

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NIGHT AND THE CITY

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

Photographs of Paris by Yvon

Man Ray: A man in love with a woman from a different era. I see a photograph! Luis Bunuel: see a film!
Gil: I see an insurmountable problem!

Salvador Dali: I see a rhinoceros!

Woody Allen: Midnight in Paris

The opening sequence to Midnight in Paris begins with a shot of the Eiffel Tower (naturally) at dawn. As the day progresses other landmarks appear - the Arc de Triomphe, Place de la Concorde, the Pont de Neuf - interspersed with scenes of people hurrying through the streets. An afternoon shower arrives, blows over and by nightfall we are back at the Eiffel Tower. In three minutes we get an effectively understated and elliptical impression of the city so that as soon as Owen Wilson turns up to the hotel you know he has not just fallen in love with Paris, it’s already everything he has imagined it to be. There aren’t many cities that can get that kind of treatment. New York is too noisy and overwhelmed by skyscrapers, Rome used to in the 1950s and London almost could except, honestly, it doesn’t have a reputation as a romantic town. The other reason the sequence works is that Paris has been so thoroughly photographed that even if you haven’t been there you will recognize the places. You have seen them before.

About five years ago I made some enquiries to a respectable photographic dealer about Yvon photographs and got the response that they were very cheap; in other words, why bother? Well, it’s true; you still shouldn’t have to pay more than a couple of dollars for a vintage photo postcard by Yvon, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t good. Cheap can also mean undervalued, or in Yvon’s case, there is so much of his work floating about that you can reassess his place in history and anoint him to the pantheon of great French photographers if you want; that isn’t going to budge prices. Good. We are lucky, because in an era when fine art photography is increasingly being marketed out of the reach of a lot of people, it’s important that we can still buy an excellent image like the one at the top of the page for next to nothing. It is among Yvon’s most famous shots, taken sometime in the 1930s when Paris was the centre of surrealism, and if he had been in the right circle and only released a few prints, today it would be considered a masterpiece of French photography. 

In 2010 W. W Norton published a book dedicated to Yvon’s photographs by Robert Stevens. Not having seen the book in the flesh it is hard to comment except that several reviews carry the observation that Yvon invented the Paris of our imaginations. By that the critics mean that when we think of Paris in the last century we unconsciously conjure up images he saw first. I doubt they believed that. Paris in the 1920s and 30s does have vivid connotations for a lot of us but the scenes are intimate - smoky cafes and jazz clubs inhabited by left bank artists and intellectuals – not his grand vistas. It is unlikely that several critics hit upon the same notion without a little help, so we can assume the book gave it to them but so far as photography was concerned, Yvon’s commercial instincts drew him to a Paris everyone would recognize and he sought locations already instilled in popular consciousness. Take as an example the study of the Palais de Trocadéro through the framework of the Eiffel Tower. By 1900 photographs from almost exactly the same viewpoint were being produced as postcards, half tone, photochrom prints and other processes so even people who hadn’t been to Paris knew the scene well.

In the 1900s Eugene Atget used to get up at four in the morning, pack his camera and tripod and trudge across Paris just to capture a particular street corner at sunrise. Such dedication has never been that uncommon among photographers but it required something more than simply forgoing sleep. If walking the streets and observing various features appeared to be a desultory, aimless waste of time, it actually required discipline and a practiced ability at observing small details. In effect the photographer had to see and compose the image, sometimes weeks before it was eventually taken. It is obvious from Yvon’s photographs that he subjected himself to the same rigours as Atget. He didn’t just stumble on these scenes on his walks but noted them, calculated the best conditions for the photograph he wanted and then returned at the right time, regardless of the hour. Dawn was best, when the weak light created the strongest atmosphere and the streets were empty of people. They are rare in his images. He probably saw them as an inconvenience unless, like the bookseller above, they represented an essential element of the Parisian street. 

The big distinction between Atget and Yvon is that Atget’s work was much more personal. His city was represented by small shopfronts and anonymous backstreets and often as not the photograph could have feasibly been taken in any French or, for that matter European, town as Paris. Working just a few years later, Yvon rarely published an image that wasn’t immediately identifiable as being Paris. This difference didn’t come down to a question of how closely one or the other observed or how they defined the city but their market. Atget advertised himself as a photographer of scenes for artists, a job description he invented himself for a business with a limited but faithful clientele. Yvon wanted the general public. With that in mind he published his photographs as postcards and small snaps in paper wallets. He could have found work with a magazine or a publisher but by going out on his own he kept a couple of things Atget also valued; independence and integrity. 

What really distinguishes Yvon’s photographs from the enormous pile of clichés is a particular atmosphere. Fog was his friend and the best time to make use of it was just before dawn in late autumn. Some of the critics not only compared Yvon to Atget but to Brassaï (or rather, Stephens did) and presumably they weren’t just thinking of the two photographers coincidentally wandering through the city but an atmosphere. Shooting around Montparnasse and Montmartre, Brassaï used fog to heighten the seedy and slightly dangerous ambience. You get the impression his subjects regarded the weather as useful cover and protection.  You can also date Brassaï’s work to the 1930s because of the cars and the clothes people wore. In Yvon’s work, Paris in the fog became stately, baroque and somewhat gloomy, and it was timeless too.  A lot of Yvon’s photographs could have been taken at any time fifty years either side of when they actually were. 

A photographer who set out to sell as much of his work as he could via the cheapest and most accessible formats available would hardly care how posterity judged him. Even so, Yvon (his real name incidentally was Pierre Yves-Petit) deserved a monograph. If some of the claims made in his favour are dubious, compare his work instead to his rivals, the dozens of other companies plying the postcard and snapshot market and it becomes apparent that he worked harder, cared more about his work and had standards that wouldn’t allow him to compromise. Like the others, he tended to keep his distance when he shot a scene, framing the point of interest in the centre so there could be no ambiguity about what the viewer was supposed to be looking at, but his work is better than average because he chose vantage points that encouraged the viewer to look into the image and see its details. If he wasn’t the genius the critics declare he was he didn’t have to be. The real mark of his photographs wasn’t that they show the Paris of your imagination but one he had an affinity for. That was Gil’s discovery at the end of Midnight in Paris too. You know at the end as he walks off into the rain with Gabrielle that he will never meet Hemingway, Gertrude Stein or the others again but their Paris vanished years ago.

Apart from the postcard of the rhinoceros, these photos come from an album of some 80 miniature views collected some time in the 1920s.

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MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

SQUARE WORLDS

12 Kodak Instamatic Snapshots from Paris

“Nobody realizes that some people expend an enormous amount of energy just trying to be normal.”
Albert Camus

 It depends on your perspective really; was 1963 the year of Kennedy’s assassination and a point where the world changed? Or was it another year in a long summer, so to speak, where the killing of a president, or any international crisis, could barely dent the feeling that all was well with the world? If you were a university graduate with a job and a house in the suburbs, what did you really have to worry about?

In 1963, Kodak brought out the Instamatic. The film came in a cartridge that was simply fitted in then removed when all the frames had been exposed. Not that many people had a problem loading cameras but this was an automatic age and Kodak had always understood that for its customers, the less they had to do the better. Aesthetically the cameras weren’t much to get excited about. They were boxy and made from moulded plastic but then this was an age of plastics, and disposability. People were beginning to furnish their houses with moulded plastic furniture. Clothing was made from nylon and polyester. A man could dress himself for work in the morning, confident that not one single piece of his attire was made from organic materials. Never mind that in the summer he began to stink like a polyurethane rubbish bin; bring on the new world.

The other important point about the Instamatic’s aesthetics was that the prints were in square format. Kodak had been producing square formats for cameras for years but the Instamatic prints were enlargements. Remove the cartridge with its 24 frames, each approximately 23mm square, take it to the chemist or drug store and a day later pick up twenty four 90mm square prints. Enlargements, mind you, bigger, glossier and better than you imagined when you looked through the little plastic viewfinder.

The early sixties were a wonderful time to be living in the suburbs, or so we were told, and the square format Instamatic was the perfect camera for the times. One might think it was invented with grassy lawns and carports in mind. The square format had the effect of enclosing the world within the frame, as though nothing existed outside it. That suited the ideal of the suburban home as a place of refuge from the noise and grime of the inner city. The suburbs were still too. A husband could leave for work in the morning, his wife could look through the picture window at midday and he could return in the evening and throughout the day very little, if anything, had changed. Other cameras were built for action, to record rapidly unfolding motion and cluttered, hectic scenes; the Instamatic treated the ordinary as beautiful. It respected the rigid lines of modern architecture and it could make the banality of contemporary living look natural.

One day in the early 1960s a Parisian brought a new Kodak Instamatic home and began recording, well, not exactly the stuff of their daily life, more its artifice. He or she began playing with family and friends, posing one another in windows or doorways like fashionable models and setting each other up against the most mundane backgrounds. That was another thing about the Instamatic; it was a camera for having fun with. No serious artist would touch it. The people had no idea of course that in a few years photographers like Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz would take expensive, professional cameras into similar terrain and turn the square format into a kind of weapon that reflected the suburbs as barren, soulless places. Perhaps the French photographer would be amazed to see the prices an original Adams print gets these days; then again, they were French, living in the era of Sartre and Beckett. It’s just as possible they appreciated how absurd modern life was and knew the best machine for recording it was the cheap, ugly, supremely functional Kodak Instamatic.