The Kodak Carousel
First posted in 2017 - edited in 2022 for clarity and a better read.
Tanya with one of her sisters somewhere in the 1970s
Where the Story Begins
Many years ago, I was studying for a diploma in General Art and Design at an art school on the blustery, freezing cold coast of North Norfolk. Part of our studies in, the first year, involved a module in photography.
Black and white photography seemed mystical and strange to me, involving cameras I had never used, evil-smelling chemicals for processing and a large amount of patience. Something which eludes me often. Students would appear mysteriously out of a dark room into the canteen, blinking in the bright light and peering at test prints in a tray that held the promise of something great.
Up to this point, my photography expertise had involved a Kodak Instamatic and a Halina point & shoot. I took many artless pictures of my friends and family, most of which are buried in their paper envelopes stacked in boxes under the bed. I had no knowledge of f-stops or apertures, which film or which camera to use.
I remember sitting in the first lesson, being handed a Pentax k1000 and looking at it with a vague sense of despair. Dials, calculations, focusing. It was all a long way from my rough-and-ready domestic approach to taking pictures. But I absorbed something about the mechanics and shot a series of reasonable photographs involving my friend running into and away from the sea one afternoon. I slowed the shutter speed with each exposure until, in the final frame, my friend's image disappeared.
Light and Film
Our humble art school was situated in Great Yarmouth, a seaside town on the North Norfolk (UK) coast where the slot machines ruled within the rows of arcades along the seafront and Rosie’s nightclub was a quid to get in on a Monday night.
At least, I think that’s right.
It’s 30 years ago now. Time does funny things to memories.
Some of my friends began to use slide films for their projects. A carousel was the way they presented their transparent images.
I loved the dust dancing in the projector beam as each slide clicked into place and the projected image silently slid into place on the wall. Presentations by visiting artists would often be shown in this way, in a room gently heated by the breath of students and the warmth emanating from the projector itself.
I loved, and still do, how slides look when you hold them up to a window. Like thin, colourful jewels, they glow as the light filters through the film. Once projected, the image spreads across the wall, becoming something different; something to watch rather than something to examine.
Mad Men
Fast forward twenty years to 2007 and I have two children, one a toddler and the other, a new-born. My husband and I are attempting to watch Mad Men while they sleep. TV viewing never went particularly well when our girls were young. We were hard pushed to watch anything that lasted beyond ten minutes. Anything longer and we were really trying our luck.
But once the girls were asleep, we would enjoy what time we had to collapse on the sofa and watch something on the telly.
Mad Men was the new one-to-watch series. But after a few episodes, we moved on to something else. I found the show impossible to connect to. Its high style, misogyny and cool manner contrasted sharply with my messy, chaotic life of nappies, baby groups and all the other stuff of young parenthood.
A Sentimental Bond to Technology
Fast forward again to 2017. I find Mad Men on Amazon Prime and start again from the beginning. I find much more to engage with the second time around. I’m in a different place. My children are older, I am older. We live in a different house with two cats and a number of fish in a large aquarium.
In the thirteenth episode of Season One, there is a wonderful scene towards the end of the episode. It features a presentation by Don Draper to Kodak. He’s pitching for the advertising campaign of their latest piece of equipment known as The Wheel.
The pitch is disarming. I wasn’t expecting anything so sentimental.
“Technology is a glittering lure but there’s a rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash if they have a sentimental bond with the product.
My first job. I was in-house at a fur company with this old pro, a copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. Now Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is new – creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. He also talked about a deeper bond with the product – nostalgia. It’s delicate but potent.”
By this point, itches, insect bites, spots and scratching are all my mind can focus on. I’d forgotten about calamine lotion. When I was at boarding school, we would dab it on the pimples that erupted unkindly on our pubescent faces. It would dry and flake and made no difference at all but we kept trying.
I ponder the idea of memories being an itch and photographs being calamine. Itching and scratching. Drying and flaking. Delicate but potent. Memories are slippery things. Sometimes they can be recalled with absolute clarity. Sometimes they sink into a subconscious soup mixing merrily with stories from other people.
A Place of Comfort
Photography is often associated with nostalgia, a longing for something remembered or a yearning for a place of comfort. Draper utilises this knowledge with the skill of an Ad Man and the sentiment of someone whose personal life is increasingly defined by tragedy, infidelity and distrust.
He knows the photos in our family albums become a vessel for our memories, a way of making a connection with our lived experience and remembering.
In his presentation to Kodak, he shows a heavily edited version of his own family life; his children playing, Christmas, a wedding, a pregnancy, a kiss with his wife. Brief, joyful, tender moments that hide the bitter truth of his own complex personal narrative.
“Teddy told me that in Greek ‘nostalgia’ literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.
This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine.
It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called The Wheel. It’s called The Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and around and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.”
A Time Machine
I love this notion. The Kodak carousel moves our memories around in circles in an album of pictures. There’s something melancholic too. There's no resolution, no end, only an endless cycle of repetition.
I think of this and remember a talk I gave at an event a few years ago. All the participants had to present a project and talk for three minutes in a Pecha Kucha style. Three minutes is not very long. I decided to tell a story.
My children were still very young at the time and bedtime always involved reading them one of their favourite books. For my talk, I was interested in mixing up my own words and pictures, muddling experiences in an attempt to reveal how vulnerable photographs are to a telling and re-telling. I used memories from my childhood mixed with photographs of my two daughters. I looked for links between one and the other, shamelessly manipulating thought and feeling.
I made a video of it and share it here.
These Moments Matter
These Moments Matter, 2011.
