Visiting Research Fellow, Dr Jayne Knight, reflects on a recent conference paper that enabled her to reflect on the changing fortunes and future potential of a historic collection.

From cameras to smartphones: Addressing changes in popular photography in the Kodak Gallery

In 2024, I completed my AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD at the University of Brighton and the National Science and Media Museum (NSMM), Bradford. My project examined the establishment and development of the Kodak Museum Collection (KMC) and how it has been used to tell histories of popular photography. Comprising cameras, technological apparatus and photographs as well as advertising material and ephemera, the KMC was collected by former industry leader Kodak and was displayed at their company museum in Harrow between 1927 and 1984, where it represented over a century of film-based photographic technology and apparatus. For the last thirty-five years, it has been utilised by NSMM to tell the story of popular photography through what is now known as the Kodak Gallery.

Joining the Centre for Design History as a Visiting Research Fellow in November 2024, my first piece of work was to present a paper based on my PhD research at a 3-day international conference titled Museum Dialogues; Exhibiting, Collecting and Activating Photography, held at the University of Sunderland in collaboration with the North East Photography Network. This conference was organised as part of a 12-month AHRC research networking project aiming to explore the interdisciplinary boundaries of art history, photography, visual culture, new media, museum and curating studies from both practical and theoretical perspectives. The conference focused on the international shifts in museum practices and their implications for photographic cultures with participants presenting on topics and case studies from reframing photography in the gallery to the latest digital strategies.

My paper, titled “What’s an Instamatic Camera? Photos are Taken on Phones!”: The Changing Story of Popular Photography in the National Science and Media Museum’s Kodak Gallery, analysed how NSMM has utilised KMC to tell the story of popular photography, and how they have periodically responded to technological shifts and experiences of popular photography. With displays largely unchanged since their opening in 1989, I reflected on what these mean for visitors today, who are increasingly unfamiliar with the type of film camera photography that is represented. This stemmed from a conversation I overheard between an adult and a child when I was passing through the Kodak Gallery in 2023, giving my paper its title.

The Instamatic 36 Camera. National Science and Media Museum, Bradford. Photographed by Jayne Knight, 29 October 2024.

At the centre of this conversation was a Kodak Instamatic 36, part of the hugely popular range of accessible snapshot cameras manufactured between 1963 and 1988. Considered as current technology when it first went on display in 1989, over three decades later, it is unfamiliar piece of technology to some. Discussing the display together, the adult nostalgically described their memories of owning and taking photographs on a Kodak Instamatic, with the child replying with total dissociation, that photographs were taken phones, not these old objects. As this conversation highlighted, the significant changes in photographic practice, and audiences’ engagement with the gallery displays, is increasingly at odds with the gallery’s original aim to tell the story of popular photography.

Thinking about the changes that have occurred since the galleries were originally installed in 1989, I reflected in my presentation on the newer displays that periodically sought to update the analogue story of popular photography by representing digital-based practices. As I highlighted, these changes have encountered their own interpretive challenges. Examples included displays that became rapidly outdated by representing ‘current’ technology, as was the case with a display exploring family albums on CD-ROMs, or the interactive exhibit exploring the photo-sharing platform Flickr which presented telling signs of its age through superseded digital photography statistics and an outmoded app icon wallpaper. These reflect challenges for any museum seeking to collect and exhibit contemporary practice in permanent displays that may last for decades.

Untitled [View of ‘Go Global’ display statistics], 2023. National Science and Media Museum Insight, 703612. Photographed by Lucy Williams © Board of the Trustees of the Science Museum

Get the Picture. National Science and Media Museum, Bradford. Photographed by Jayne Knight, 11 July 2025

The Snapshot Photography Display in the New Sound & Vision Galleries. National Science and Media Museum, Bradford. Photographed by Jayne Knight, 11 July 2025

Despite first impressions, however, the conversation that I overhead demonstrated that the Kodak displays at NSMM continue to offer valuable histories of popular photographic practice, and opportunities for discussing continuity and change across generations, despite the seemingly outmoded camera technology once used to snapshoot and the fundamentally different computational infrastructures used to share similar images today. The purpose of my PhD, and my conference paper, was ultimately to examine how past practices and collections might inform future displays and interpretations in an ever-changing museum sector that needs to serve a range of different audiences. My study looks back, but these are live debates that inform  the challenges NSMM currently addresses as they launch their brand new Sound and Vision galleries, as of July 2025, after a major period of museum refurbishment, public funding and community consultation.

 

Caption for Header image:

Untitled [View of the1950s display], 2023. National Science and Media Museum Insight. Photographed by Lucy Williams © Board of the Trustees of the Science Museum.