KODAK IS DEAD

Those words were some of the last penned by George Eastman. He included them in his suicide note.

They mark an ignoble end to a noble life, the leave taking of a truly great man.

For all intents and purposes, the Eastman Kodak Company is through. It has been mismanaged financially, technologically and competitively. For 20 years, its leaders have foolishly spent down the patrimony of a century’s prosperity. One of America’s bedrock brands is about to disappear, the Kodak moment has passed.

It is as wrong as suicide, and, like suicide, is the result of horrifically poor decisions, a fatal wound of self-infliction.

But George Eastman is not how he died, and the Eastman Kodak Company is not how it is being killed. Though the ends be needless and premature, they must not be allowed to overshadow the greatness that came before.

Few companies have done so much good for so many people, or defined and lifted so profoundly the spirit of a nation and perhaps the world. It is impossible to understand the 20th Century without recognizing the role of the Eastman Kodak Company.

Kodak served mankind through entertainment, science, national defense and the stockpiling of family memories.

Kodak took us to the top of Mount Suribachi and to the Sea of Tranquility. It introduced us to the merry old Land of Oz and to stars from Charlie Chaplin to John Wayne, and Elizabeth Taylor to Tom Hanks.

It showed us the shot that killed President Kennedy, and his brother bleeding out on a kitchen floor, and a fallen Martin Luther King Jr. on the hard balcony of a Memphis motel.

When that sailor kissed the nurse, and when the spy planes saw missiles in Cuba, Kodak was the eyes of a nation. From the deck of the Missouri to the grandeur of Monument Valley, Kodak took us there. Virtually every significant image of the 20th Century is a gift to posterity from the Eastman Kodak Company.

In an era of easy digital photography, when we can take a picture of anything at any time, we cannot imagine what life was like before George Eastman brought photography to people. Yes, there were photographers, and for relatively large sums of money they would take stilted pictures in studios and formal settings.

But most people couldn’t afford photographs, and so all they had to remember distant loved ones, or earlier times of their lives, was memory. Children could not know what their parents had looked like as young people, grandparents far away might never learn what their grandchildren looked like.

Eastman Kodak allowed memory to move from the uncertainty of recollection, to the permanence of a photograph.

But it wasn’t just people whose features were savable; it was events, the sacred and precious times that families cherish. The Kodak moment, was humanity’s moment. It was that place in time where there is joy, where life has its ultimate purpose.

From the earliest round Brownie pictures, to the squares of 126 and the rectangles of 35mm, Kodak let the fleeting moments of birthdays and weddings, picnics and parties, be preserved and saved. It allowed for the creation of the most egalitarian art form. Lovers could take one another’s pictures, children were photographed walking out the door on the first day of school, the person releasing the shutter decided what was worth recording, and hundreds of millions of such decisions were made.

And for centuries to come, those long dead will smile and dance and communicate to their unborn progeny. Family history will be not only names on paper, but smiles on faces.

The same Kodak that served is in space and on countless battlefields. This company went to war for the United States and played an important part in surveillance and reconnaissance. It also went to the moon and everywhere in between.

All while generating a cash flow that employed countless thousands of salt-of-the-earth people, and which allowed the company’s founder to engage in some of the most generous philanthropy in America’s history. Not just in Kodak’s home city of Rochester, New York, but in Tuskegee and London, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He bankrolled two historically black colleges, fixed the teeth of Europe’s poor, and quietly did good wherever he could.

And all the Kodakers over all the years are essential parts of that monumental legacy. They prospered a great company, but they – with that company – blessed the world.

If it is, we should be grateful that such a company ever existed. We should rejoice in and show respect for that existence.

Modern Art Photography

If we consider the history of creating imagery from primitive to the modern there must be certain timelines that account for how things happened. The ancients in the region recorded their thoughts, left messages and depicted their lives on the canyon walls, in their caves and on any media they found useful. Certainly all cultures found their own way to communicate; the talented few always came forward as their recorders of history. Were these talented few born with the creativity? Or did they develop this talent through intensive training in the technical process?

If we spring forward a thousand years we have the benefit of watching the evolution of the form. Although photography dates back to Leonardo da Vinci's inventions during the Renaissance, the modern camera was invented in the 1830s with daguerreotypes. The first cameras were large and bulky, so people came to the photographer's studio to have their pictures taken. This meant that the main purpose was to record what people looked like, which could be done more quickly and inexpensively than ever before. This has had a profound impact on art, and has prompted many artists to explore new styles. And so, modernism was born.

In painting and printmaking the form evolved into what was called “the new art,” beginning with the impressionists in about 1870. Photography continued recording the accuracy of what people looked like or to record history as evidenced during the Civil War with Mathew Brady. Here in Utah C.R. Savage was one of the first to record the important history. In southern Utah Jack Hillers accompanied John Wesley Powell in 1872 in the explorations of the Grand Canyon.

The science of the form drove their technique. But was it art? Most imagery was posed and not impromptu as evidenced by E.S Curtis and his circle. Images looked stilted and did not leave much to the imagination. But suddenly we spring forward to the turn of the twentieth century and the group formed in New York by Alfred Stieglitz.

Stieglitz was originally a leading figure in the promotion of the idea that photography harbored the same aesthetic potential as painting. He fostered the progress of artistic photography in this direction by showcasing the work of young photographers who challenged the dominant conception of the medium. Instead of showcasing the use of photography as a tool for documenting or depicting the details of nature, these young photographers attempted to show, primarily through imitation of painterly styles, that photography could attain status as an art form.

This new approach to art photography was inspirational for all that followed the form. They strive to do more than record the images of nature, rather they make a serious effort in creating art; art that is beyond simple imagery. This approach to modernism was introduced to the painter Maynard Dixon in 1920 when he met the young New York photographer Dorothea Lange. Dixon began distilling and simplifying his approach.

This period, 1920-1960, brought Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and several other modernists to these regions for the purpose of making fine art photography. These were the purists with serious bias about their art form in black and white. Much of the art occurred in the darkroom. And then there was the life of photographic paper. The argument was that color would not hold. As color was introduced in the late thirties the art photographers held steady with their beliefs about the power of black and white. Several pioneers broke away from the old beliefs as papers improved with newer coatings and a better lifespan. Eliot Porter and David Muench in particular continued with the science of color as an art form.

And then digital happened. All of the old ideas about the art form changed.

After thirty years of work in all the above, Modern Art Photography was born. Suddenly new converts having found their own voices in this new digital world. The technical side of the problem is conquered with powerful technology from Canon and Nikon. The science is now taken care of and it is only left up to the artist to find his own voice in this brave new world.

Jack Hillers Show Opens in two weeks.

I worked there as a software engineer

The woman in charge was an idiot so I told them I was leaving and gave two weeks notice

The idiot woman told me I couldn’t leave. I insisted for the two weeks that I was going. She honestly thought as the boss she could ORDER me to stay. She came from a government agency (20 and out!)

When I didnt show up the next Monday after my two weeks notice I got about 20 phone calls asking where I was, including several telling me I had to come to a meeting they would organize to explain myself.

I told them I didnt work there any more and I was not planning on coming to their meeting. They CALLED me from the meeting...

Then when they found out this idiot woman didnt know anything about writing software and needed to call me back to finish it about a years later, I found out I was on their ‘black list’ because I left and they could not hire me back. (Remember- THEY called ME to come back, because I was the only one who was able to make it work)

Libtards, all of them

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