If you are a 90s kid, you would mostly remember this iconic ad about a couple wanting to click a ‘selfie’ and decide to give the camera to someone from the wedding procession that was passing by. Soon the camera keeps getting passed and the entire wedding procession ends up in front of the camera.
This ad introduced the Kodak KB10 in the Indian market. It had a basic idea, to encourage Indians to think of themselves as photographers.
KB10 was an iconic camera with easy controls, just a shutter button, a sliding shutter cover, a view finder and a flash that was automatically turned on as you clicked it. For a lot of middle class families, this became a staple camera to photograph homes, children playing dress up, first car, first dog, new furnitures, basically everything that was meant to be remembered and recalled.
It’s ease of control and high success rate is what made it so adaptable and iconic in Indian market.
The ‘Kodak Moment’
Kodak launched the KB10 in India in 1997 at ₹995. At the time, owning a camera was still a very well thought out, debated purchase. Photography was limited to important events like weddings, holidays, birthdays and family occasions. There was a certain sense of formality to be followed in image making and the camera was not yet something everyone automatically carried in a pocket.
Kodak's problem, then, was how to convince the large middle class risk averse population of the country that owning a camera did not need any particular knowledge of photography. In fact, cameras needed to become staple in the households, an important investment to record everything in your life.
The KB10 was an unusually good answer. It was the smartphone for photography. Small, unassuming, unintimidating camera that made photography easy and rewarding at the same time.
By 2000s, it became the most sold camera in the country with more than 1 million cameras sold already. A moment to photograph had already become ‘a kodak moment’.
A camera designed around doing less
The KB10's specifications make more sense once you understand this ambition.
It has a fixed 30mm f/8 two-element aspherical lens, a shutter fixed at 1/100 second, and fixed focus from roughly 1.2 metres to infinity. It takes 35mm film and recognises ISO 100, 200 and 400 DX-coded film. Power comes from two AA batteries.
There is very little to set incorrectly because there is very little to set at all.
Opening the sliding lens cover turns the camera on. The flash fires automatically with every picture, even outdoors, where Kodak suggested it could work as fill flash. Kodak recommended ISO 400 film as the most versatile option for general indoor and outdoor use.
After taking a photograph, you manually wind the film forward with the thumb wheel. At the end of the roll, you rewind it with a little crank.
That is about the extent of the interaction.
Seen now, it resembles what we might call a reusable disposable camera.
Kodak used the simplicity of its functions and sold it as freedom from photographic knowledge.
You just had to point the camera in approximately the right direction and 9/10 times you would end up with the perfect photograph.
Using the KB10 now
The world has made a move toward Y2K culture, and it is worth remembering what really gave the 2000s its iconic looks and photographs.
But even beyond that, KB10 still finds a huge audience for its affordability and ease of use for someone starting out in analogue photography.
It also makes for a great camera for smaller moments, moments you would like to slow down in and hold in film and memory forever.
The joy of analogue is in the limitation of the medium. 36 frames is all you have to capture everything you want to capture, until the next film. That limitation itself forces you to slow down, live, and experience each moment in much more depth.
25 years after Kodak’s introduction to this camera, we love it because it takes control away from us, giving us moments to live and experience the slow life.
More than twenty years later, using one can feel like a reminder that perhaps photography does not always need quite as much intervention from the photographer as we have come to expect.
Sometimes there is a subject in front of you.
A frame.
A shutter button.
And that is enough.
