Mark Twain gave sage advice about the proper way to behave in the afterlife.

“Upon arrival do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to. It’s not your place to begin.
Don’t try to Kodak him. Hell is full of people who have made that mistake.
Don’t ask him what time the 4:30 train goes; there aren’t any trains in heaven, except through trains, and the less information you get about them the better for you.
Leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.“

Mr. Clemens was always one to embrace technology.  He would certainly love the vain and narcissistic pursuit of the selfie – the glorification of you.  And there is a subtle point in this reasonably famous quote, and that is the use of the word Kodak, otherwise a brand name, as a verb.  There may be a modernization of this, now that we store our images on “The Cloud.” It was the latter day equivalent of the word Xerox, that being only one brand of copy machine.  And now of course, much to the chagrin of Microsoft, who would rather we “Bing it,” we still “Google it,” even if as yahoos we are actually “Binging it.”  Life does get confusing.

In Twain’s case I believe that his usage belies the incredible rise of Kodak and the popularization of photography.  Of course, with popularization came its sister mediocritization, as we discussed in my recent blog about the pictorialists, who hated this sort of thing.

Figure 1 -Kodak Picture Spot from Disney’s MGM Hollywood Studios, from the Wikimedia Commons and uploaded by Tregowith under creative commons license.

Kodak’s dominance of photography through popularization got to the point where you couldn’t go to a scenic spot in the United States without encountering a sign referred to as a Kodak Picture Spot.  “This location recommended by top photographers to help you tell the story of your visit in pictures.” Stand here and you will get a beautiful picture, which by the way you could take to the nearby Kodak store and have it processed.  Oh, and please buy some film while you’re at it.  You wouldn’t want to run out. Figure 1 is an example from Disney’s MGM Hollywood Studios. Kodak ended this sponsorship relationship at Disneyland in 2012.  Which is pretty much when Kodak, the inventor of digital photography cried “uncle” and gave up the consumer photography market.

Of course, anyone who loves photography for the sake of art and beauty abhors this concept, which caters to the view that photographs are essentially trophies.  That’s the least of it.  The more paranoid among us might suggest a certain level of mind manipulation, an attempt to cookie cut as into the perfect customer – to Xerox us into similitude!.