"You Press the Button"

In 1888, George Eastman launched Kodak with a famous slogan: "You press the button, we do the rest." Photography left professionals' hands to become a mass gesture—and a new way to archive one's life.

The first Kodak was a box preloaded with one hundred exposures: the amateur photographed, then sent the entire camera back to the Rochester factory, which developed and reloaded. Eastman eliminated all technique. In 1900, the Brownie, sold for one dollar, put cameras even in children's hands. In 1888, George Eastman launched Kodak with a famous slogan: "You press the button, we do the rest."

The commercial discourse is striking: the camera is presented as reliable memory, capable of "fixing" moments the mind would let escape. In an era fascinated by experimental psychology, the image opposes mechanical exactitude to memory's fragility. Photography left professionals' hands to become a mass gesture—and a new way to archive one's life.

The effect is lasting. Memory ceases to depend on narrative alone to become a material, reproducible, and accumulable object. The family snapshot invents a practice—documenting one's own existence—that would culminate, a century later, in permanent digital photography.