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The age of everyday camera drones has arrived—bringing strange new forms of photography. Camera hounds are using drones, which now cost only a few hundred dollars at RadioShack, all over the place. They’ve snapped images of models walking a Fendi catwalk, street scenes in Las Vegas, and surfers breaking waves down in Peahi, Hawaii.And they’re causing new privacy panics. Many communities are discovering to their alarm that local police now want to snoop from the sky. And women now fret about new, sneaky forms of voyeurism, “creepshots,” from above.
This summer one female beachgoer became so incensed by a man assembling his drone near the sand that she physically attacked him, grabbing his face and calling him a “pervert.”In essence, drones are changing the face of photography—and causing big cultural upheavals. How will society change when anyone can spy from above?We can find some clues by looking at the last great shift in photography: the rise of the personal camera and the birth of the “snapshot.” It was a moment that changed the way we recorded the world. The Original Kodak, introduced by George Eastman in 1888, came preloaded with film for 100 snapshots and sold for $25.(NMAH, SI)Photography emerged in the early 19th century, but well into the 1880s it was a difficult, ponderous thing to do. The reigning forms of photography recorded onto chemically treated plates and paper. Taking a picture required the subjects to sit still for a half minute or more—“torture,” as the social critic Walter Benjamin recalled. Families trooped into studios to get portraits taken, but they were a study in stiffness: everyone sitting ramrod straight, afraid to move—or even to change their expression—for fear of blurring the photo.“Those pictures were, for the most part, pretty formal,” says Diane Waggoner, an associate curator of photography at the National Gallery of Art. “People didn’t smile much.” The conventions of photos were still “modeled on painted portraits.”Things changed dramatically in 1888 when George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera.
A small hand-held box, it cost only $25—about the price of a higher-end iPad in today’s money, which put it in the range of the well-off middle class. And it offered simplicity: It arrived with 100 shots preinstalled, and when they were taken you shipped the entire camera back to Eastman’s factory in Rochester, New York, where workers developed the photos and mailed them back to you along with your reloaded camera.
“You press the button, we do the rest,” as the Kodak slogan rang.Suddenly, photography became unmoored in space. People took the camera out into the sunshine—and were immediately entranced by the ability to capture lively, goofy everyday motion.They took shots of themselves on bicycles, of jumping into the air at the beach, of children playing with pets. They attempted to capture moments of evanescent action, like a cat pouncing on a bird, or spectacular news events, like when a train accidentally busted through a wall.
Humor abounded: When people posed for “snapshots”—the newfangled word—they mugged for the camera, even turning around to display their rear ends or pretending to milk horses, as Douglas Collins writes in The Story of Kodak. In a prefiguring of modern meme culture, people made visual jokes: One trend had people posing with their heads poking through holes in newspapers, punning on “breaking the news.” Others snapped pictures of themselves in the mirror, the original “selfies.”“They were often playful,” Waggoner adds.
Indeed, people rarely took pictures of anything sad. It was as if, after decades of morose stiffness, they were stretching their limbs, loose from the corset of the studio.Part of the freedom came from surplus. When you had 100 possible snaps in your camera, each picture became less precious—so people could experiment with odd angles and ideas. “They didn’t have to treat them as special things,” Waggoner notes. Soon, they started developing new aesthetics, new photographic conventions. “That photo at a party where everybody piles into the picture?
That wasn’t something you’d ever see in a studio,” says Todd Gustavson, curator of technology at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.A game even emerged called “snapshooting,” a sort of photographic version of tag: You tried to escape while someone raced around trying to catch you on film. (A famous photo shows a laughing, 20-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt hiding behind a female relative as he plays the game.)The idea that an event would be snapshotted changed people’s behavior. Brides began arranging their weddings and dinners specifically so they’d look good in the pictures. People were training themselves to see the world through the eyes of the camera.“It was not only changing your attitude toward photography, but toward the thing itself that you were photographing,” says Brian Wallis, the chief curator at the International Center of Photography. “So you had to stage a dinner, and stage a birthday party.”In 1900, Eastman produced the Brownie, a camera even more radically cheap—a mere $1—and marketed specifically to children. It sold so well that by 1905, fully a third of American households possessed a camera.Not everyone was happy with the rise of the snapshot.
Professional photographers were repelled by the weird, ungainly, often out-of-focus shots that amateurs produced. “Photography as a fad is well nigh on its last legs,” prayed the art photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Other pundits bemoaned “Kodak fiends,” camera obsessives who carried their device everywhere and were apparently so constantly taking pictures that they would space out and miss their trains.The snapshot evolved, too.
Eastman adroitly realized that people would take even more pictures if they were reminded of the power of photos to preserve memories. “Memory has a most aggravating way of storing up details for which we don’t care a crooked sixpence—and of dropping out of sight forever things we really want to know,” as one Kodak ad proclaimed. The 1943 edition of Eastman’s book How to Make Good Pictures encouraged parents to lifelog their children’s every step, producing “an intimate snapshot diary covering the entire period from cradle days to full manhood or womanhood.”Edwin Land, the creator of the Polaroid in the ’40s, regarded his device as a powerful memory machine. Land envisioned that one day “you’d have a wall in your home, and you’d be snapping all day long and shooting all day long, and posting them there,” says Christopher Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid. “What he was imagining was a giant Facebook wall.”.The snapshot changed the power dynamics of photography. Now that people were carrying cameras around, a social conundrum emerged: What if your picture were taken without your permission—while you were out in public?This was a new dilemma. Previously, in the age of the studio photo, “you had to sit there and pose.
You not only had to give your consent, you had to cooperate a lot,” notes Ryan Calo, an assistant professor of law at the University of Washington who specializes in privacy issues. With a hand-held camera, a picture could be taken of you unawares. Prev ious Page 1 of 2 1.