Category Archives: Photography

Ball’s Great Daguerrian Gallery of the West

In Cincinnati, on Fourth Street, between Main and Walnut, in Wood’s large building. The great gallery, illustrated here, is twenty by forty feet. There are also two “operating rooms” in which the photographs are taken, one of them prepared especially for children and babies, and a workshop in which the plates are prepared and developed. From Gleason’s Pictorial, 1854.

Kodak As You Go

From an advertisement in Photoplay, 1921. —The use of a trademark as a verb was fabulously successful in building brand identity, but trademark lawyers would never permit it today. Folding Kodaks really are remarkably portable. The camera folds into a nearly indestructible object about the size of a paperback book; it unfolds to take generously large roll-film negatives. It is thus not mere advertising hyperbole to suggest that even one of the larger folding Kodaks, like the one in the picture, could be taken on the ski slopes. The shiny square in the upper right of the camera is the prism viewfinder; you look down into it to see a mirror-image view of your composition, which is why the photographer is holding the camera at chest level.