Who will really grasp digital? And why Kodak may not survive.
The History of Kodak: Graham Harrison on Newshour on BBC iPlayer 49.00 minutes in.
The most well known films produced by the Kodak Corporation, which may shortly be filing for bankruptcy, like Tri-X, Kodachrome and my much loved Ektachrome 64, gave photographers a wonderful, if limited, pallet palette with which to express themselves. Digital photography, on the other hand, effectively has no such constraints making it much harder to pin the medium in the mind and be creative – to really run with digital. Well, that’s what I was getting at on the BBC World Service last night. Yes, digital photography has yet to be mastered. Someone will do it, but who?
I also failed to mention how Kodak’s problems today echo their reluctance to radically update their products throughout the 1970s and 80s. It was only the introduction by Japanese rival Fuji, of films like Fuji Velvia in 1990 that seemed to shake things up at the corporation and force Kodak to look to the future. They’d done the groundwork of course. Believe it or not, Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, but then left others to really drive digital technology forward. Looking back, perhaps the writing was on the wall even then.
• Graham Harrison on The History of Kodak, on BBC iPlayer was the final item on Newshour on the BBC World Service broadcast at 2100 GMT, January 5th 2012.
[...] gist of what Graham says in this short interview is in his blog post ‘Kodak’s Last Frame?‘ in which he comments on the likely end to the few remaining Kodak films with the Kodak [...]
In response to Kodak’s Last Frame? Peter Marshall elaborated on Kodak’s predicament on >Re: PHOTO (see pingback below), “Perhaps it was the efforts that Kodak had to make to catch up with the superior films and papers from other manufacturers that made them take their eye off digital. But I think it was more that they were always essentially a materials company, and with digital the lead went to the camera makers – you didn’t need film any more.”
Just two weeks after the BBC World Service broadcast I was talking about Kodak again, this time on WNYC radio with Louise Story, investigative reporter for The New York Times. It was January 19th and Kodak had just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Louise cut to the chase. “Kodak,” she said, “is a company that failed to remake itself … back in the 1970s they actually invented the digital camera but didn’t bring it out because they did not want to eat into their film sales, and that was a fatal mistake that took place over 30 years ago. That’s why we are seeing this bankruptcy today.”
• Louise Story of The New York Times and Graham Harrison on Eastman Kodak Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy on WNYC radio, January 19th 2012.
• Good stuff? Here’s Louise Story on WNYC quizzing president and CEO of Olympus, Michael Woodford, on the corporation’s £1.1bn fraud case in November 2011: Former Olympus Executive on Why He Blew The Whistle. Again the programme is The Take Away, with John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee on WNYC radio.
Neil Turner writes about using a Kodak DCS520 digital camera on his blog DG28 (DG stands for Digital Guru, and Neil did guide me online during my first tentative steps into the digital realm). “Talking with others who used the Kodak DCS series camera from that era we all agree about one thing – how good Kodak’s software was,” says Turner. “What a shame that they threw away their lead in professional digital photography.” The Early Days of Digital on DG28.