Images and Enterprise

Winner of the Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology.

From the early daguerreotype to the rise of the motion picture, Images and Enterprise explores the business, technical, and social factors that transformed the American photographic industry between 1839 and 1925. Reese Jenkins's prize-winning history traces the technical changes that culminated in George Eastman's creation of the Kodak system of amateur photography in the 1880s. Its compact, simply operated cameras would revolutionize an entire industry—even if at first the whole camera had to be mailed back to the company for developing and reloading. Images and Enterprise also vividly portrays the emergence of cinematography in its relationship to traditional photography and reveals the growing importance of institutionalized research, as Eastman Kodak and the other American and European photographic materials manufacturers strove to develop commercially practical color photography.