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Table of Contents
Only one post needed this week.–JM
Geoffrey Bennett, “Colour Comes to All,” The Story of Popular Photography
Geoffrey Bennett traces over a century of history of popular photography from the earliest days of color in the mid-late 19th-century to the emergence of amateur and even “snapshot” photographers in the 1980s. When color photography was first developed in the mid-19th-century, it required the use of three color filters in order to produce a color photograph. The process was expensive and painstaking (129). Later, the “Autochrome” process developed by the Lumiere Brothers of France allowed for photos to develop in a single emulsion, thus shortening the process (131). Finally, the “Tri-Pack” system of the 1920s-30s entirely eliminated the need for a set of filters (133).
Still, even over the course of nearly sixty years, photography was still expensive, fragile, and color photography was not widely available to the public. It would not be until the 1940s-1950s that color photography would become popularized in the United States. Part of this popularization was accelerated by the US Government, who desired the ability to quickly take surveillance photographs (135).
When color photography was finally commonly available by the 1950s, it only took roughly another 30 years for photography to transform from a specialized process done only in official clubs in darkrooms, to a hobby that even the most inexperienced amateur lacking technical skills could participate. The success of mass marketing within photography blossomed quickly - particularly with the advent of Instant Polaroid cameras in the 1960s, and the “point-and-shoot” cameras of the 1980s (141).
The availability and spread of color photography sparked mass intrigue and curiosity that was heightened by the sense of euphoria derived from producing a color photograph by oneself. Nowadays, it is easy to take photography for granted, as almost all of us have the ability to document - stylishly or not - any given moment of our lives using our smartphones. If you have paid for a smartphone, you have paid for an almost unlimited amount of photographs. But this was not at all the case even fifty years ago. Photography expanded over the course of less than two centuries because of the many institutions involved in its promotion - including inventor-entrepreneurs, the US government, and of course, amateurs.(==Glynnis Farleigh)
Christine Kleinegger – “Out of the Barns and into the Kitchens: Transformations in Farm Women’s Work in the First Half of the Twentieth Century.”
Venus Green, African American Women in the Bell System, 1945-1980 (1995)
Other readings
“Some Notes on Vocational Guidance”-J.A.L. Waddell