Time Capsule #10: the Kodak Instamatic camera
You could slice up the Class of '71 student pie into three unequal pieces:
1. shutterbugs with SLR cameras,
2. people with no camera,
3. and those of us who had a Kodak Instamatic.
My guess that this is in ascending order by quantity.
Introduced in 1963, the little easy-to-use camera was a commercial hit for Kodak, and by 1967, there were tens of thousands out there and about a dozen different models we might have received as birthday or Christmas gifts.
The motto of Kodak's founder, was "You press the button, we do the rest," And that's what the Instamatic --and Kodak-- did. The 126 film cartridges could be swapped out by dummies, klutzes, and stoners --basically fool-proof.
Hence, some of the photos hidden in garage, basement, and attic archives, the kind of memorabilia that you'd just as soon forget and hope your children never saw.
I can't remember where I took the exposed film cartridges for developing in Hanover, maybe The Camera Shop down by The Nugget on Main St.
The phrases "Point-and-Shoot" and "Film-Burner" both refer to something crucial about those Instamatics. With no lens or exposure adjustments, you could grab your aptly-named Instamatic and get a shot off in seconds. As for the second, the price of the film and the cost of developing it were low enough to encourage taking lots of pictures without bothering with composition, lighting, or angles: you could always sort the prints and keep the good ones.
Part of Kodak's marketing was to offset the rising popularity of the excellent 35mm Japanese cameras. It worked: real photographers, people who took pictures for The D or The Aegis, used 35mm single lens reflex cameras like Pentax. These guys would use a darkroom to make their own prints of those black-and-white art pix. (One 'interesting' example is on page 189 of the '71 Aegis. Go ahead: look it up.)
But the rest of us numbskulls took silly or incomprehensible photos with our Instamatics and dropped them off for developing.
If you drew a historical line from the Kodak Vigilant Six-20 that my parents used to take baby pictures of me in 1949, to the Brownie that took my Cub Scout photos, to the Instamatic I took to Dartmouth, you'd trace my cameras through the Pocket Instamatic 110 I took to Madrid, a Canon AE-1 that I used to share my children's childhoods with their grandparents, a Sony F1 digital, to well, duh! the iPhone.
You can pick up a used Kodak Instamatic on eBay today for $3.50, but I don't know about 126 film. Nor do I know where you could get the film developed, now that the drugstores have all stopped offering that service.
Related:
A lot of servicemen came home from Vietnam with a Pentax bought during R&R in Tokyo.
My brother-in-law, Andy Lund, was a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Force running military airlift traffic at Tan Son Nhut and got one during a trip to Tokyo in '67. Twenty years later, when he took it to a camera shop in Tacoma for a cleanup and repair, the technician told him, "You had this in 'Nam, didn't you?"
"How did you know?" Andy asked.
"All the Pentaxes you guys had in Vietnam have this green mold inside."
Another feature of PTSD.
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