“IT MUST BE confessed that the etiquette of the ‘kodaker’ has not kept pace with the development of the ‘kodak.’ It is difficult for some people to understand that there are those who have a strong prejudice against being promiscuously ‘snapped at’ through a camera,” opined an article from the Ladies Home Journalin 1900. The invention and release of the Kodak camera by New York entrepreneur George Eastman in 1888 heralded a new generation of photographic cameras, intensified debates about the unauthorized capture and circulation of people's (particularly women's) images at a time of shifting and unstable gender roles, and contributed to the recognition of a right to privacy in the United States, the first in the common law world.

When Eastman first introduced the trademarked and patented Kodak camera to the world at the Convention of the Photographic Association of America in Minneapolis, he cemented his role as the father of modern photography. In previous decades, photography had been an expensive and time-consuming pursuit requiring expert knowledge, complicated bulky equipment and the ambient conditions of light and stillness only generally achievable indoors within a studio setting. Individuals who desired likenesses of themselves or their family members sat for professionals in their studios or shops. This was a popular pastime, sought after by a growing new middle class (of shopkeepers, managers, clerks, and small traders) as well as budding “celebrities” (such as Oscar Wilde, as discussed in the previous chapter). By 1850, Americans were spending between eight and 12 million dollars a year on photographic portraits, and portraits constituted an astonishing 95 percent of all photographic production.

Photography, from its beginnings in the 1830s as Louis Daguerre's “daguerreotype” and William Henry Fox Talbot's “calotype,” had radically altered the nature of portraiture, creating images that were simultaneously more authentic and more autonomous than their drawn or painted equivalents. As a form of writing with light (with all the attendant theological and philosophical associations), photography occupied a unique relationship to truth.