Kodak Advertising Department All-bum

Behind the scenes at the Eastman Kodak Company, the ad men who so skillfully marketed cameras and film seem to have also enjoyed a laugh. Gathered in this workplace album from 1940, the heads of the male advertising staff appear montaged onto the bodies of pinup girls and femmes fatale. One “Legs Casey” smolders in a satin nightie, and a man named Pete appears to sport bloomers emblazoned with a box of Kodak film. In on the joke, the album-maker affixes his own face—“me”—to a kitschy cowgirl bedecked in fringe.

Kodak owed its early success as much to advertising as to technological innovation. The so-called Kodak Girls—an imagined collective of chic, camera-wielding women in their teens and twenties—became the fresh faces of the corporate brand, at once embodying the progressive potential of photography and locating its commercial applications squarely within a traditional domestic zone. Insofar as the Kodak Girl snapped vacation pictures, friend gatherings, and first birthdays, she marketed a profitable model of documentary photography: fixing memories of family life. Coding her exaggerated femininity as an analogue for technical ineptitude, advertisers conveyed the simplicity of these new machines, so intuitive that even women could use them.

Well versed in the iconography of the Kodak Girl, the maker of this album scraps her for parts. Reimagining his colleagues in her image, he probes playfully at notions of professionalism in their field, even as the montages themselves reveal no shortage of technical prowess. In one telling composition, he melds the head of a mustachioed coworker onto the lithe frame of a Kodak Girl in a printed playsuit. Beside her hovers the query from a popular ad campaign: “Have you plenty of Kodak Verichrome film?”, to which the album-maker has scrawled a simpering affirmative response. His hybrid figure holds a camera in one hand and brandishes boxes of film in the other. Who, one might wonder, is the amateur now?