"Any school-boy or girl can make good pictures," declared an Eastman Kodak ad for the Brownie box camera soon after it launched in February 1900. It was an astonishing claim, given the unwieldy equipment, arcane chemistry, and extravagant expense of 19thcentury photography. Sold for a dollar and preloaded with film, George Eastman's ultra-portable, one-button cardboard shooter could hardly match professional rigs in image quality, but by sponsoring contests, starting clubs, and charging just pennies for prints, Eastman nurtured something else: photography as a social activity. Eastman sold 150,000 Brownies in the first year. Within a decade nearly a third of Americans owned a camera, and even those who didn't could not avoid the "Kodak freaks" who toted their Brownies everywhere and traded snapshots for their scrapbooks.
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