Somewhere along the way he also became enthralled with the envelopes the pictures used to come in. He considers which is finer: the envelope with the picture of the over-exposed little girl or the boy blowing a bubble. He spends long minutes trying to decide whether the picture with the patented photo correction treatment is better than the one without, and he asks me and M over and over which one we like better.
And the name: Kodak. So bizarre, so made up. He loves it.
This is an obsession I can relate to. Kodak and I share a hometown, and when I began to explore the many thrift-stores of Rochester I found lots and lots of Kodak cameras which I started to buy, quite inexpensively. As my collection grew, friends and family began to pick up cameras for me and I began to amass variations: the same camera but one made in Rochester, another in England and still another in Canada. Or different years with different lenses. Or special cameras made for dentistry, that were basic snapshot cameras but with focal distances of nine inches to one foot, with a little string measuring tape attached so that the hygienist could hold the string against the patient's gum and then pull the camera back until the string was taut to get the picture perfectly in focus. Those cameras had special flash covers so if the bulb exploded, as they sometimes did, they wouldn’t burn the patient’s face.
When I was only a little older than our older boy is now I had a Kodak Instamatic that took film that came in black plastic cartridges and used Flashcubes that had four bulbs in each cube and would pivot 90 degrees every time a picture was taken. Film was expensive and I hoarded my pictures, passing up many opportunities to snap so that I’d still have a couple pictures left when an even better thing to photograph would come along. I never had as many flashcubes as pictures so I would ration my indoor shots. Pressing the shutter was always a leap of faith because it could be weeks or even months before I’d ever see the picture. Sometimes I couldn’t remember what the picture was of, when I’d finally get the roll developed.
So when he asked if he could take some pictures of flowers on a grey day last week, I gave him a brief lesson on the digital camera and turned him loose while I did some chores. Fifteen or twenty minutes later he was eager to download the pictures to the computer so I plugged the camera in expecting to find four or five and HOLY COW he took TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN PICTURES! Actually, somewhere in the twenty minutes he gave the camera to his brother so he only took 201. The following pictures are all by the artist, exactly as he took them. But not all 201. No way.
