Too Easy for Words: Kodak Instamatic

I was probably around 13 when I was given a Kodak Instamatic with the drop-in film cartridge. It was the mid-’60s and I had been using my dad’s Pratktica 35mm SLR camera. But I was really just a snapshot-taker and I remember thinking, wow, no longer a pain to try to load film into a camera. Instamatics had a plastic-moulded body (plastic injection moulding was a post-war innovation) and the most basic of controls: a shutter-release button that also advanced the film in the cartridge and a built-in flash that popped up and took one of Kodak’s single-use “peanut” bulbs. They were, in essence, like Kodak’s earlier Brownies — continuing in George Eastman’s dream of bringing photography to the masses, the latest inexpensive “point-and-shoot” camera. Eastman Kodak sold 50 million Instamatics between 1963, the year they came on the market, and 1970. I learned years later that Kodak’s advertising was aimed at women and young people, like me.