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by Luca Fontana
The fairy tale of self-inflicted doom - Kodak Edition
10.3.2020
Translation: machine translated
Time and again, the media, the photography industry and all traditional sectors of the economy in general are accused of self-inflicted demise. This is too simplistic, and constant repetition doesn't make it any more true.
The article "The Things That Kill Themselves", which translates roughly as: "The Things That Kill Themselves", gives a good overview of everything that has gone wrong in photography in recent decades. In my opinion, the explanations for this are less good.
For author Paul Melcher, everyone is simply self-destructive, or in other words: stupid. Printed photo magazines are stupid because they don't adapt to the Internet age. Kodak was stupid because the company didn't see digital photography coming. Picture agencies are stupid because they are destroying the market through price dumping; photographers are stupid because they put up with it, and camera manufacturers are stupid because they haven't understood what people really want: namely to send and share their pictures online.
Explaining the whole world with stupidity is not exactly the most intelligent approach.
The fairy tale of adaptation
Let's take the example of Kodak. "If they had adapted in time, they would still be around today." This is a popular fairy tale in the tech scene, and it is often told with reference to Kodak.
The Kodak fairy tale goes like this: once upon a time, Kodak was a huge, cumbersome company with a lot of money. But it missed out on all the developments in digital photography and stubbornly stuck to film photography. Even when everyone had long since realised that film had no future. And if he hadn't died, he would still be producing film today.
However, Kodak did not miss out on digital development, but was there from the very beginning. A little reading on Wikipedia is enough to get an impression of this. The Bayer filter, which is still used in most digicams today, was invented by Bryce Bayer, a Kodak employee, in the 1970s. In 1986, Kodak developed the first digital photo sensor with more than one million pixels. In 1991, the company launched the DCS, the first commercially available DSLR. In 1992, Kodak introduced the Photo CD - and thus the possibility for everyone to have their films archived digitally and fully automatically. Kodak was also a pioneer in the development of OLED and launched the world's first digital camera with an OLED display in 2003. The first digicam with two lenses also came from Kodak. With the Nexpress printing presses, Kodak was and is also a big player in digital printing.
In its heyday, Kodak had 120,000 employees. But that was back in the 70s. After that, business wasn't going so well. This means that it was not digital photography that caused Kodak difficulties, but competition from Japan. The fact that the USA was losing jobs at the expense of Japan was a general trend in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in the tech sector. The Japanese were producing at least as well as the Americans, and cheaper to boot. Kodak's decline initially had nothing to do with digital photography. When digital photography was ready for the market, the entire camera market was firmly in Japanese hands. Logically, the digicams then also came from Japan.
Kodak has continuously withdrawn from unprofitable divisions, such as the sale of film cameras in 2004, but it has done little good. Globalisation brings new competition, new technologies bring new competition.
Nobody destroys themselves
This is also the case with the other points Melcher raises. Printed magazines can't just go online and everything will be fine. Because the prices for online adverts are very, very low. For Google and Facebook, the calculation works out because of the volume. Not for small magazines. For a printed magazine, there is hardly any economic benefit to putting everything online. If it were that easy, they would all have done it long ago.
Or the photographers. It's easier to take good pictures today, and it's also easier to learn the craft. This inevitably means there's more competition. At the same time, the demand for professional photography is falling because the magazines are closing. What should a photographer do in this situation? Are they daft if they accept poorly paid work?
Or the picture agencies. The fact that you don't get more than two dollars for a boring stock photo is understandable in today's flood of images and is hardly the fault of the database operators. The images that are not stock photos are still really expensive - see Keystone, see Getty.
The photography industry is not self-destructing. It's not suicidal. It's just not so easy for everyone to hold their own in a rapidly changing environment. I don't believe that photography as a whole is going to the dogs. On the contrary: for those who pursue it as a hobby, there has never been a better time than today.
Header image: Decommissioned Kodak building in Toronto, 2010
David Lee
Senior Editor
David.Lee@digitecgalaxus.chMy interest in IT and writing landed me in tech journalism early on (2000). I want to know how we can use technology without being used. Outside of the office, I’m a keen musician who makes up for lacking talent with excessive enthusiasm.
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