This box of camera gear arrived at my house recently.  It is a kit that belonged to the father of a friend.  Most of my old cameras have no personal history attached beyond sometimes having a name written on a camera back or case.  So, it is fun to see a whole kit accompanied by some details about its original owner and his use of the equipment.

The camera is a Kodak Vigilant Six-20 with a nice 3-element f4.5 lens and a No.1 Kodamatic shutter with a 1/200 top speed.  That makes the camera quite a practical shooter even today.


Before pictures can be made again with the Vigilant, however, some attention will have to be given to the bellows which have pinholes in the corners.  This is the case with about any of the post-war Kodak folders as the bellows were made of cloth with a rubber-like coating which inevitably deteriorates over time.  It is still possible to find replacement bellows on ebay, but it is also feasible to just cover the pinholes with a couple layers of black fabric paint, even when the damage is quite extensive as in this example.




The kit also includes three very interesting old selenium exposure meters, all in working condition.  The most unusual is the Sekonic 21b.  An on line search showed the meter to be rather rare, but I did find an excellent revue of it at photo.net by Rick Drawbridge.


The Weston Master II by its weight and carefully crafted scales is clearly meant for serious work.  I used several Weston meters early in my photo career, but those tiny numerals make it a challenging tool to use now with old eyes.


The Gossen pilot meter is a truly extraordinary example, complete with the box, all of the documentation and even a receipt for purchase from Kurt's Camera Corral in Albuquerque dated 9-1-73.  The tiny selenium meter closely resembles a modern Sekonic Twinmate which I recently purchased, and it performs very similarly.


The Ideal Rangefinder, the Series 6 Kodak Lens Hood, and the K2 Yellow filter are all very practical and appropriate accessories for the Vigilant camera.



I have always felt collectors have given insufficient recognition to the excellence of the graphic design embodied in the handy Kodak manuals and  exposure guides.  The examples in this kit are in pristine condition and could be used productively even today.


One of the exposure guides entitled "How to Make Pictures at Night" had some notations on the back in which the photographer recorded the details of several photo sessions, with dates between August and December of 1946.  They show that he was using Ansco Plenachrome and Kodak Verichrome 620 roll films.  The notes also point to the fact that this photographer was a meticulous, skilled craftsman who valued good tools.


And, finally, a bit of photographic whimsy, the tiny Star-Lite camera.  I recall seeing these cameras advertised in comic books and novelty catalogs.  Today, they are popular items on ebay and are usually referred to a "hit-style cameras" or "spy cameras" and sometimes they are accompanied by tiny rolls of foil-wrapped film.  While the "spy" reference may have been used in advertising at times, the real appeal, of course, was to the miniaturist aesthetic which was perfected over a period of many centuries in China and Japan.

Quite a few of my old cameras require the user to estimate focal distance and to set that guess manually. For the most part, I've never found that much of a hindrance to making pictures with them, particularly in good light. Once in a while, though, in dim light and in close proximity to the subject, it is nice to have one of the little accessory rangefinders to help things along.

Of the three models I own, the tiny Voigtländer rangefinder is the most elegantly designed and crafted. The view of the image is pretty clear and contrasty, and the rotational movement of the dial is very smooth. The Voigtländer's small size adds little bulk to my pocketable cameras, and the standard-sized mount fits any camera that has an accessory shoe. I acquired this rangefinder recently from a fellow in England and it required no adjustment to the image alignment.

 The vertical orientation of the Kodak rangefinder allows it to be used with cameras having tall, flip-up viewfinders, as was the case with many of the old Kodak folders. The Kodak's cast metal case has a sculpted look that harks back to the 19th Century; the round, eye-like front window seems like something Jules Verne might have dreamed up. A very nice feature of this rangefinder is a pointer and rotating circular scale that allows reading the distance setting while looking through the eyepiece. The image alignment was off when I got the rangefinder, and it proved quite a tedious job to get it working properly.

The Kodak offers a split-image view similar to what one would see through the coupled viewfinder of an Argus C3. The coincident-image featured in the other two rangefinders seems a bit easier to use, but the semi-transparent mirror coating on such instruments inevitably deteriorates over time, and the lack of image contrast becomes problematic.





The Ideal Range Finder, as it says boldly on the side of the box, was

Made in U. S. A.
FEDERAL INSTRUMENT CORP.
Long Island City, New York

The design is fundamentally functional with a black plastic case and a screw and bolt adjustment that looks like it came from the corner hardware store. As it turns out, this rangefinder offers the brightest view of the three, and is no less accurate than the Kodak or the Voigtländer. As stated in the product note folded in the box, the original buyer got a three year guarantee which included an offer to adjust the instrument if a drop caused it to lose proper alignment. The note also indicates that the user can do the readjustment by turning the set-screw on the dial. I found that to be true, though it required clamping the metal nut with channel-lock pliers and carefully exerting considerable force with a well-fitted screwdriver to turn the adjusting screw. There is no mounting bracket to fit a camera accessory shoe, though it would be easy enough to glue one in place.

Kodakery, a monthly magazine for amateur photographers first appeared in 1913. Single copies cost five cents, and a dollar would get you a two-year subscription. While the publication was clearly a vehicle for advertising Kodak products, it also contained a lot of useful information for the photo enthusiast. Each issue was twenty-five or thirty pages in length, with about equal space allotted to text and photo reproductions. The design and layout of the publication was spare and elegant.

There were technical articles in Kodakery aimed at the advanced amateur on subjects like film and print processing. Most of editorial content, however, was less demanding, and focused on how best to compose pictures of subjects likely to be of interest to the average person who was mostly interested in recording events and scenes of daily living. Portraits of family members, pets, and children got attention in every issue, as did subjects like garden flowers, travel, sports, marine and snow scenes. While many of the published photos had a rather bland look by today's standards, all were technically excellent and clearly made by people who were advanced amateurs or professionals. None of the featured photographers, however, were big-name artists of the time.


A couple pages at the magazine's beginning and four or five at the end were typically devoted to advertising – only for Kodak products. The company's capacity for technical research, camera making, and a near monopoly on film production gave it tremendous market leverage. Marketing was conducted through franchises to small shops like drug stores and photo equipment specialty shops, and was supported by expertly coordinated advertising campaigns in Kodakery and elsewhere. Kodakery ads seemed to exclusively feature domestically made products from the massive Rochester, NY establishment. However, though it was not apparent in the pages of Kodakery, the company very early on also was engaged in developing overseas markets and production capabilities, an effort which included the acquisition of promising innovative companies like the Kodak A.G. Dr.NagelWerk in Stuttgart which developed the stunningly successful 35mm film cassette. The end result for Kodak was an industry-dominant position very much resembling that of Microsoft or Google today.
Pictures of children, pets and women engaged in idyllic domestic activities were most likely to find their way onto Kodakery's covers. The children were sometimes pictured wielding cameras - a clear allusion to the Kodak message that it made photography easily accessible to anyone. Women were also frequently shown using Kodak cameras to record family life. The magazine also featured frequent shots of smiling young women in dramatic poses, wearing stylish clothing at the beach or in some exotic location like a cruise liner. Those same images, resembling fashion shots, over time became very prominent in Kodak advertising presentations.


Kodakery, Volumes 1-12 can be found on line at the mcnygenealogy site along with other Kodak publications.  Beginning in 1943 the "Kodakery" title was used for the in-house publication for Kodak employees.

(This article was originally posted on my web site.)

I recently came across some references to a lavishly produced book entitled The Story of Kodak by Douglas Collins.  When I looked up the book at Amazon I found that it had been published in 1990 and -- much to my surprise -- a "very good" used copy could be had for less than a dollar.  Even with the added four dollars for shipping, I would still be out only about five bucks to own a copy.

The author, Collins, writes resonably well and he tells some pretty good stories about the founding and development of Kodak throughout the Twentieth Century.  As is clear in the Acknowledgments, however, his primary sources were Kodak publicity people and the book is quite clearly an officially-sanctioned history of the company.

Given that caveat, there are some interesting things to be found in Collins' account and I learned quite a lot about some of the major players in the company's history including the founder, George Eastman, the company's first research director, Kenneth Mees, and the pair of musician/scientists who invented Kodachrome,  Leopold Godowsky, Jr. and Leopold Mannes.  The real value of the book, though, is to be found in the final chapter in which Collins becomes the mouthpiece for the delusional vision of the company's directors about The Future of Photography that would quickly bring the giant of the photo world to its knees.

Collins briefly quotes the opposed opinions of an academic and a professional photographer about the likelihood of electronic imaging replacing the use of film in photography.  He then says:

"Between these two positions lies the question of whether Kodak should aggressively enter the business of electronic image making.  Simply put, will video render silver-halide photography a quaint, antique way of making pictures?  Kodak analysts think not.  By all accounts film remains and will continue to remain the preferred medium for picture taking...

...One Kodak executive has speculated that electronic imaging is currently about where the video-cassette recording industry was ten years ago, and that it will take at least that long for its impact to be felt.
     For amateurs then, despite the imminent arrival of electronics, the chemically produced photograph is still the established and favored way to make visual records.  The same is true of televised news, the demand for silver-halide pictures shows no signs of decreasing...

...The world may be linked by electronic images, but the act of sitting in a darkened theater and watching events unfold on the silver screen seems to special to be replaced by more private forms of entertainment."

All that seems to be an amazing lack of foresight for a company that had nearly limitless resources of information and expertise.  Certainly, much of the failure to come at all close to predicting the near future can be attributed to inertia and self-delusion.  I suspect, however, that what was of more importance was financial skulduggery and the push for short-term personal gain by upper management -- the same kind of forces that drove the general recessionary crash of 2008.  Collins' account, of course, sheds no light on those crucial internal events in the company's Rochester headquarters.

So, there is another book to be written about how it all came apart at Kodak.  Perhaps more importantly there is also a book which might be written about the company's real accomplishments and the people who made them happen beyond the few top dogs Collins talks about.  What is most interesting about his cast of characters is the omission of so many really important ones including the scientists, engineers and designers directly responsible for so much of the innovation in photographic imagery during the recently-concluded Century.  For instance, Rudolf Kingslake, the great Kodak lens designer, does not even rate a listing in Collins' lengthy index.

The Wikipedia page about Eastman Kodak fills in a few of the gaps in the Collins narative and Google searches on names including Rudolf Kingslake, Arthur H. Crapsey, Jr., and Miller R. Hutchison, Jr. will turn up useful nuggets.

While I waited to see my dentist last Tuesday, I browsed through Forever New Mexico, a book of vintage photos edited by Arnold Vigil. Over the Table of Contents was the photo below. The caption read: "A woman snaps a picture of another woman next to a hogan on the Navajo Nation in western New Mexico. Date and photographer unknown, New Mexico Magazine Archival Collection."



The camera looked like an Argus rangefinder model from the '30s or '40s. Midway through the book is another picture of what looks to be the same camera, though it is in the hands of a different woman, portrayed as she "snaps a picture at the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial." It clearly is an Argus rangefinder, either a C2 or C3 model. The (actual) photographer and date of the picture are again unknown.



Further on in the book is a much older photo in which one of the figures is cradling a Kodak No.3A folder, a camera dating from 1910-1914 that used 122 film and produced 3.25 in. x 5.5 in. negatives. The caption reads: "Agapito Pino photographs his mother washing clothes at San Ildefonso Pueblo sometime in the 1920s. Photographer unknown, courtesy of Museum of New Mexico (Negative No. 3740)."



I did a search on the name of the fellow with the old Kodak and turned up a 1939 picture of an "Agapito Pino", described as a "San Ildefonzo Indian Clown Dancer". It seems quite likely it is the same fellow ten or fifteen years along. The photographer who made the picture of the later Agapito was Burton Frasher, who produced tens of thousands of postcard photos during the first half of the Twentieth Century all over the Southwest. The Frasher Postcard Collection is housed at the Pomona Public Library.



All the pictures have a staged look, but they are still rather charming, I think, and I was very pleased with this unexpected find. It was certainly one of my better experiences in a dentist's office.

I came across an interesting little article while browsing through the blog of the Western Photographic Historical Society about Kodak designers. One of the most productive was Arthur Crapsey, Jr. whose many designs from the '40s and '50s included the Brownie Hawkeye Flash and the Signet 35.





I would like to recognize the designers of all the cameras shown on my web site, but such information is hard to come by. If you know the designers of any, I'll appreciate it if you will pass on that information to me.