The Cavalcade of Color. Kodak and the 1939 World’s Fair (original) (raw)
Related papers
Études Photographiques, 2012
To illustrate the company's importance in the history of photography and its emergence as a widespread popular practice, Eastman Kodak's participation in world's fairs is a particularly useful and informative object of study. The negotiations that surrounded photography's first emergence as a consumer medium reveal a discontinuous history rooted in a complex process of integration made up of advances and retreats, attempts and rejections, which seem to crystallize in 1939 in the staging of the Kodak Pavilion at the New York World's Fair. The marketing strategies employed to launch the company's color film were built around a fundamental tension between the familiar and the monumental, between identification and fascination, which made the giant slide show The Cavalcade of Color one of the fair's most popular attractions.
Visions of Tomorrow: Art and Commerce at the 1939/40 New York World's Fair
This paper was presented at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, NY, on 13 April 2014. It deals with Noguchi’s participation in the Fair, the ways in which artists’ involvement reflected the planners’ agenda, and the role art played in promoting the Fair’s ostensible aim, “Building the World of Tomorrow.” The primary research material is in the 1939/40 New York World’s Fair Collection, New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts Division, http://archives.nypl.org/mss/2233.
Process, Products, and Possibilities: Interactive Exhibition and the Future, 1933-1940
This study explores how world’s fairs and museums embraced participatory and decidedly showy exhibitions during the 1930s. In Chicago, the Century of Progress Exposition (1933-1934) opened alongside the fledgling Museum of Science and Industry, the first science museum in the United States with few “hands off” signs, and the New York World’s Fair (1939-1940) offered spectacular visions of the future of the American city. This paper briefly examines some specific exhibits and explores both the purpose and the exhibition strategy used by each display. The essay begins by describing some differences between the depression era fairs and previous American expositions to show how the 1930s expositions departed from earlier ones. Using the contemporaneous establishment of the Museum of Science and Industry as an example, the larger goal is to demonstrate how the depression-era fairs influenced museum exhibition philosophy by building exhibits that were complex, interactive, featured clear expository narration or signage, and spoke directly to the common person. These exhibits provided groundwork for today’s museology. The four examples presented here: the Houses Of Tomorrow, Coal Mine, Futurama, and Democracity, demonstrated through innovative display how applied science (as opposed to theoretical science) and industrial design could improve life for average Americans. These popular exhibits, and their corporate sponsors predict the traveling, often high-tech, “blockbuster” exhibitions of today’s museums.
Colorsnap! Colour Photography, the Market in Patents and the 1929 Crash
History of Photography
Although very short-lived, the Colorsnap process, promoted in 1928-29 by the small British company Colour Snapshots (1928) Ltd, is mentioned in several histories of colour photography processes as a key example of a false start in colour photography. Such accounts emphasise problems with technical quality and poor industrial organisation, but miss the key role of the market in patents and changes in investment practices in the period. From 1926 to 1929, the London Stock Exchange saw a frenzy of speculative investment in companies touting new innovations in media, linked to gramophone, radio, cinema, photography and photo-telegraphy. Like most of these companies, Colour Snapshots was inexperienced and completely dependent on the success of an untested patent. The company promoter deployed the then-common strategy of underpricing, consequently the company was undercapitalised and unable to finance production. Colour Snapshots was liquidated in the Great Slump of 1929-33. This article situates it in wider cultures of the market, in cultural practices of invention, and ideologies of modernity and innovation. It argues that the rise and fall of Colorsnap expresses the opportunistic practices of invention and speculative finance of the time.
Chromatic Objects. Colour Advertising and French Avant-garde Films of the 1920s [2018]
2018
The article aims to illustrate the possible connections between the emerging science of advertising and a selection of French avant-garde films made during the 1920s. The connections between advertising and avant-garde films provide an opportunity to reflect on the function of colour and black and white in the visual culture of the 1920s. Indeed, advertising reinforces a subjective and non-indexical understanding of colour, establishing an alternative spectatorship model to the realistic ideology that was emerging during the same period. The article attempts to demonstrate that avant-garde films follow the same model of spectatorship, despite making only an occasional use of colour.
he Color Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema,, 2018
Since the early 1900’s Broadway has been called the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferation of its light-studded movie marquees and advertising signs, but this was in fact a misnomer as the area was often in blazing color. From Oscar Gude’s Heinz Pickle Sign of 1891 to Douglas Leigh’s EPOK animation and monumental signs of the forties, this chapter discusses Times Square/Broadway’s colorful electrical signs, arguing for an expanded understanding of animation’s historical role in the turn to color in visual culture. It contends that electrical billboards or ‘spectaculars’ were intermedial forms of animation, marshalling sensual and affective experience that linked color, glass and light stimuli in mesmerizing immersive imagery.