Antique and Vintage Kodak Cameras
Information Wants To Be Free: 56 Years of Kodak Camera Catalogs Now Available
By Ben Marks — When we published our first interview with Rob Niederman back in 2008, he was focused, if you will, on historically significant and exceedingly rare pre-1900 wood cameras. Most camera collectors don't usually start at such lofty heights. A more common obsession (for some it's just a phase) is to collect Kodak cameras. A problem for all camera collectors, 100 years downstream, has always been the lack of information about the things they're trying to collect. In the case of Kodak, the...
Who's That Kodak Girl? Early Camera Ads Depict Women as Adventurous Shutterbugs
By Maribeth Keane and Brad Quinn — My father had a camera store, so I grew up with cameras and used Kodak film. These days I like digital better, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for Kodak. One day at a flea market, I came across a couple of early Kodak ads featuring women with cameras. I was taken by the difference between these early ads and those of today. In the early ads, the women depicted looked like photographers: They’re out in the world, traveling around carrying their cameras. They look like they’re...
From Ambrotypes to Stereoviews, 150 Years of Photographs
By Maribeth Keane — We both come from families that had collections and we both had collections as children. Jack lost his when his grandmother threw them out at one point. His grandmother collected china and glass. My parents had collections. When we married, we had both studied photography. In Chicago, we hardly ever saw any photographs. We went to antique shops and we prowled around in flea markets and the malls, but we mostly bought Victorian furniture and decorative things – stained glass windows and...
Rob Niederman Focuses on Antique Wood Cameras
By Maribeth Keane — How did I start collecting cameras? Actually, I had an interest in photography as a kid and owned a darkroom by the age of 12 or 13. My interest in photography grew. I spent lots of time in a Chicago gallery learning about black and white photographs by the old masters and was very fortunate to study with Ansel Adams in one of his workshops in the mid 1970s. My first exposure into antique cameras occurred in the late 1970s. I was given a beautiful, large wooden Century No.7 studio camera as...