The Bicycle Kodak

Abstract

In 1897 Eastman Kodak Company of Rochester, New York, introduced a camera for use on bicycles called the Bicycle Kodak. The Bicycle Kodak marks a significant historical point in the industrial age, representative of a growing democratization of environmental experience and perception. The development of the bicycle and photography (the kodak), independently and in their interrelationship, radically altered our landscape perception and experience. Both inventions are experiential and perceptual extensions. (Media, in McLuhan's terminology.) The spatial extension of travel has an additional temporal extension in photography. The bicycle is responsible for extending the physical territory of many persons as an individualized, self-propelled, controlled and modulated mode of transportation. It also introduced a new set of environmental experiences in the individual control of speed and motion. Photography was also a territorial extension in capturing images of the world and bringing them to people. This process changes their perception of that world. People began to see photographically and experience places vicariously through the photographic medium. The Kodak extended photography to all, and in turn helped democratize the photographic eye. The bicycle and photography changed our relationship to, and experience of, places. The Bicycle Kodak is an artifact. It can be taken as a metaphor for the symbiotic relationship between travel and photography.