Kodak-Wrapped Books

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

One time, it's a good idea:
http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/414YFAVKJHL.jpg

Two times, it's maybe a coincidence:
https://www.phaidon.com/phaidon/displayproduct.asp?id=2246

When it hits three times, it's time to call it a trend. Anybody else has spotted instances of photo books re-using Kodak classic wrappings?

 

[copake_ham]

One time, it's a good idea:
http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/414YFAVKJHL.jpg

Two times, it's maybe a coincidence:
https://www.phaidon.com/phaidon/displayproduct.asp?id=2246

When it hits three times, it's time to call it a trend. Anybody else has spotted instances of photo books re-using Kodak classic wrappings?

I imagine that somewhere in K's marketing department some junior-level exec is smiling about folks like you noticing this kind of product placement!

 

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

I imagine that somewhere in K's marketing department some junior-level exec is smiling about folks like you noticing this kind of product placement!

I think it's also another sign that "film" is cool. By using the quotes, I do not mean film itself, the melted-cow-laced-with-silver-coated-strip-of-acetate, but the idea, the concept, the cultural field of it.

My grand theory of a catastrophe scenario (you've heard it here first! ) for the future is that in advertising, we will see endless use of sprocket holes, frame numbers, yellow boxes, slide mounts, shutter clicks, rewind knobs, or cassettes, but that at the same time it will be impossible to take pictures on anything else but sensors.

Sounds a bit like a Baudrillard nightmare? Well, when you look at kids' toys, for example, you can find many examples of outdated and/or terminated technologies: manual ignition cranks on cars, biplanes, Renaissance-era sailboats, steam locomotives, etc. For some reason or another, these technologies still captivate kids and adults, but only insofar as they are props in games of make-believe, not as props in real life.

On the brighter side: we do have preserved and working examples of cars with cranks, biplanes, etc. Perhaps that is one reason why we can still be affected by their ghostly version as toys.

 

[AgX]

This is an interesting idea.

Actually one has to divide between those who know how that old stuff worked, or even keep it going and those people who are buzy with that stuff just because it's `cool´, making it `cult´. Something like 20years old over here wearing RAF signets (nothing about planes...).
Could be that they consider these sprocket things fun, not knowing how they worked.
Or, might be, they re-discover Super8...

 

[tim elder]

There's a reason why Stephen Shore's book is wrapped in an old Kodak print sleeve: it's a nod to the fact that the photographs were originally exhibited in the drugstore prints he had made of them. I don't own the book so I can't be sure but I think that the packaging is a reproduction of one of his orders.

-Tim

 

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

There's a reason why Stephen Shore's book is wrapped in an old Kodak print sleeve: it's a nod to the fact that the photographs were originally exhibited in the drugstore prints he had made of them. I don't own the book so I can't be sure but I think that the packaging is a reproduction of one of his orders.

-Tim

I own the book and its sleeve, and the package indeed seems to be an order from him. On the André de Dienes book, the Kodak box is meant to look like the boxes in which the photos of Marilyn Monroe were discovered.

I think in the case of Shore, the Kodakery is more directly pertinent, because it was fundamental to the exhibition to use drugstore prints. But at the same time, I think there is a heightened awareness of the otherness of film. You can gawk endlessly at all the minute details of the envelope from its size, and on the other side there is a montage of Shore photos inside Kodak material ("How to recognize Kodak slides", showing what Kodachrome and Ektachrome looks like, etc). Those were probably on the original envelopes (I'm too young to know...) but now they also function as a taxonomy of color film.

 

[AgX]

"the otherness of film"... I'll surely use that phrase.

 

[Monophoto]

I think in the case of Shore, the Kodakery is more directly pertinent, because it was fundamental to the exhibition to use drugstore prints. But at the same time, I think there is a heightened awareness of the otherness of film. You can gawk endlessly at all the minute details of the envelope from its size, and on the other side there is a montage of Shore photos inside Kodak material ("How to recognize Kodak slides", showing what Kodachrome and Ektachrome looks like, etc). Those were probably on the original envelopes (I'm too young to know...) but now they also function as a taxonomy of color film.

to paraphrase the current GEICO caveman commercial - - -

What?

 

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

to paraphrase the current GEICO caveman commercial - - -

What?

The fact that they use a Kodak processing bag is pertinent to the book: that's what Shore did. However, it also flashes alot nowadays because such mailers are now "weird" to the digital monkey.