I took photos of everything Kodak related I came across in Europe. That's on my list of stuff to assemble and post.
Kodak’s Problem Child
How the blue-chip company was bankrupted by one of its own innovations
The rest: https://medium.com/editors-picks/3e1d3fc4a3eRochester, New York — The cold hits me as soon as I leave the Amtrak station, stepping into a swirl of snow eddies that etch the low streets in black and white.
The terminal sits just outside the city center. In the short car ride into town, one building stands out to me from all the others. It is an impressive beaux arts landmark with five large letters, glowing in red, resting at the top:
K-O-D-A-K
George Eastman invented casual photography here in the 1880s, made a fortune, and built a small town into a city. Millions of people around the world “pressed the button” and for more than a hundred years, Kodak “took care of the rest.”
At its peak, in 1996, Kodak was rated the fourth-most-valuable global brand. That year, the company had about two-thirds of the global photo market, annual revenues of $16 billion, and a market capitalization of $31 billion. At the time of its peak local employment, in 1982, the company had over 60,000 workers in Rochester, most of whom worked in Kodak Park, as it’s known to employees and locals. The campus, a private city within the city, sprawled over 120 acres with its own power plant and fire department, once stood as a monument of imaging and innovation. Today it still stands, but vastly scaled back from the days when film production was at the core of Kodak’s work......
