Leading photographic historian Dr Kelley Wilder has appeared in a major TV documentary analysing the rise and fall of the iconic Kodak empire.
Dr Wilder, Reader in Photographic History at De Montfort University Leicester and upcoming Director of DMU’s influential Photographic History Research Centre, was interviewed as part of Channel NewsAsia’s new series Inside the Storm, which looks at fortunes of major companies including Barings Bank, Kodak and Lehman Brothers.
Its first programme charted the story of Eastman Kodak from the company’s heady success in the 1950s and 1960s to filing for bankruptcy protection in 2012.
A native of Rochester, New York, where the Eastman Kodak factory was established, Dr Wilder talked about how Kodak’s marketers were pivotal in encouraging families – targeting women in particular – to begin documenting their daily lives and those of their children.
Soon the “Kodak moment” catchphrase had entered into the English language – but the company failed to keep pace with the digital revolution.
Dr Wilder - who specialises in research on American Kodak and its links to science and industry, and is programme leader on MA Photographic History and Practice – was approached by the series producers to give an expert’s view on the influence of Kodak on photographic history and how people’s relationship with imagery has changed in the era of Instagram, Snapchat and mobile phones.
She notes: “People are enacting the Kodak moment over and over again, except not on Kodak. We still want to freeze the perfect memory.”
Channel NewsAsia is one of the world’s most-watched TV channels. It is broadcast in 26 territories including India, China, Australia and UAE and is also available online.
Others include business experts from Cambridge Business School, Singapore School of Management and Cass Business School, London.
DMU’s Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) is a world-renowned centre for study. It attracts scholars and PhD students from around the world who embrace its mission to explore photography from social, cultural, economic, and technological aspects, and has produced ground-breaking online historical databases.
In 2008, Kodak donated its research library of books and journals from the first 100 years of photographic research to DMU's Special Collections and its archive to the British Library including business documents and marketing materials used by the company on expanding to the UK in 1885.
Posted on Thursday 7 January 2016