Box full of memories
It was he who brought the cheap box Brownie camera with its rolls of black and white film to the masses, nearly 140 years ago. Now, his Kodak company in America is in deep financial trouble, has filed for bankruptcy of a limited type to keep going, and will do well to survive in the longer term. I hope it does. Kodak is a part of history.
In your house and in mine, in fact in just about everybody’s parlour, there are boxes and books of the snapshots of more than a century of our families’ journeys through the Ireland of yesteryear. Were it not for the Brownie cameras, a breathtaking invention in their time, those albums and crammed boxes simply would not exist, and we would know so much less about where we come from. There is the grandfather as a young man pitching hay in a summer meadow, braces and leather boots, wide-brimmed hat. There is the grandmother, only a young slip of a girl, smiling in the sun, and the baby in her arms is your father or mother! There is the birthplace — and it was thatched back then — a horse and trap for the trip to Sunday morning Mass. There are the wedding photos, the bride in what they called a costume, the groom in a thick three-piece tweed suit, often a watch and chain garnishing the waistcoat.
And the uncles and aunts, the nieces and the nephews, the uniformed soldiers home briefly from the Western Front where so many Irishmen died, and in nearly every album from the early years, the young and poignant faces of those who died in their teens and twenties from the scourge of consumption and, almost as totally lost to the families, those in their youth and prime who were emigrating to America or maybe Australia, and would never manage to make it home again. We have those snapshots today because George Eastman pioneered the Brownie camera and the rolls of film that converted sunlit yesterdays into precious and enduring memories.
You were very beautiful, were you not, when you were three and wearing a cotton dress and sandals and a big smile under the bow in your hair? You were the spitting image of your father, the day you were shot in your navy swimming togs in the Atlantic at the age of six?
Here’s a photo of your father at the threshing at the same age. Here’s Mary Ellen, about 19, with the first perm ever seen in the parish! Look at the moustache your grandfather wore all his life. Who was that lad in the back row there, the good hurler, the lad that got killed on the building site in Manchester? What was that silver cup won for?
There’s Jackie, before he emigrated. Lord, he was as thin as a whip that time. Here’s Tony when he had a full head of hair, instead of a bald dome. There’s Frances on the first time Paddy brought her to meet the family.
The earliest snapshots faded to brown, but the images lost none of their remarkable clarity and truth. Anyway, the best ones could be restored to mint condition by the photographic studios that came along later. And the younger shots, on the glossy paper, stayed black and white and clear for decade after decade. They always somehow looked more striking than the colour prints that began to appear from the late 1950s. More historic, somehow.
And all the Brownie products preserved themselves better than the early Polaroid instant snaps that leaked into the boxes and albums from the 1960s, but seemed to fade away almost as quickly as they developed. Our lives, in fractions of 1/25th of a second in the sun, are captured in those priceless boxes and albums that George Eastman the pioneer gifted to us.
The first newspaper I worked for was a thrifty non-union house. You had to serve as the photographer as well as the reporter, when you went on assignment. Jotter in one pocket of the duffle coat, camera in the other. Say cheese at the end of the interview. Click. I learned how to develop and print the shots in the darkroom at the office.
Digital cameras may be all the rage today but I will never forget the magic of the pictures appearing magically on the paper in the tray of developing fluid.
Suddenly the man or woman or child appeared, smiling usually, their image captured forever.
And it all started with George Eastman and his Brownie.
