2. The Ecology of Media

The first company to begin mass producing cameras was the Kodak Company, founded by George Eastman in the year 1880. Photography was once an expensive hobby reserved for the wealthy but Kodak’s $5 cameras allowed anyone to take pictures as part of their past time. With the inventions of cameras, motion pictures soon followed, thus creating the technological era we live in today. I don’t necessarily want to say cameras are the reason we have our current technology but I believe the camera played a big part. Cameras have made society far more reliant on eyes, like most other mediums. Whether or not that is a good thing I wouldn’t know because I’m far too objective to come up with a definitive answer on how I feel about technology in general, let alone have an opinion about a specific medium.


I want to note the concept of photomanipulation in regards to the camera. What you can do with Photoshop is unimaginable. People take pictures so they can completely edit and manipulate it afterward, which I sometimes find almost defeats the objective of taking a picture in the first place. I know whenever I take a picture, I manipulate it on Photoshop, a lot of the times changing the background, colours and atmosphere of the photograph. The camera plays a huge role in the process but it seems very insignificant when you’re in the middle of editing a picture. Photography was invented as a means of capturing moments, but the digital era of photography focuses more on creating moments that never took place. The camera serves a completely different purpose than it did back in the early 1900’s.

References:

Gale, Thompson. "George Eastman Biography." (2006) 2. 20 Sep 2008 .

"His Life." George Eastman- The Man. Eastman Kodak Company. 2 Oct 2008 .