Taking pictures, making movies and telling time : charting the domestication of a producing and consuming visual culture in North America

The dissertation examines how image-making, a common pastime, was made common. It investigates the ways in which the production and consumption of images in the context of the North American family contributed to the development of a distinctly domestic and privatized visual culture, and the transformation of the home into a site for privatized spectatorship.Four cultural forms (No. 1 Kodak, Box Brownie, Cine Kodak and Cine Kodak 8) are specified in this development, all pioneered by the Eastman Kodak Company. The dissertation traces Eastman Kodak's direct involvement in the popularization of image practices. It analyzes strategies used by them to make this possible, namely an appeal to the becoming lifestyles of the bourgeois and middle-classes.The analysis links the popularization of image-making and consuming practices to other popular amusements (i.e. cycling, cinema-going) to work against an artifact-centred analysis. Issues of gender and generation are critically evaluated as concepts used to instill image-making as a popular, family practice. Shifts in modern temporal and spatial experience, as well as mobility are also explored in relation to popular image-making