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"You Push the Button." The U.S. soon led the photography field (one English critic, chagrined when his country lost in an international exhibition, attributed U.S. successes to the American climate). At first, U.S. daguerreotype studios were sedate affairs, always featuring, as one writer described them, "the pianoforte, the music box, the singing of birds; the elegant drapery . . . the struggling sunbeam peering through doors of stained glass . . ." But production was upped from a few pictures to thousands a day, partly because of a group of go-getting photographers nicknamed "blue bosom boys." (As in TV, they could not properly photograph white shirt fronts.) Then photography passed two major milestones: ¶ U.S. picture journalism began with Mathew Brady, who passionately took up photography at 16. A weak-eyed, blue-spectacled portrait photographer, he decided in 1861 to cover the Civil War ("A spirit in my feet said go, and I went"). His quiet war pictures did not bring the spectator to the midst of battle, as recent war photos have, but they made a deep, clear, unforgettable record.* In 1880 the New York Daily Graphic ran a shot of "Shantytown" (the squatters' nest that later became the fashionable Upper East Side), in halftone reproduction. News photography soon became a profession, and men who learned to seize the exact moment when events show dramatically clear often made great pictures. Muckraking Journalist Jacob A. Riis stirred the U.S. with his stones and photographs of New York slums. Despite its occasional successes, the full potentialities of picture journalism were not grasped until 1936, when LIFE was founded on the proposition that "photography is the most important instrument of journalism which has been developed since the printing press." ¶ Mass production of cameras and film got under way when a Rochester, N.Y. industrialist named George Eastman invented the Kodak. Eastman coined the name to be pronounceable in any language and "snap like a shutter in your face." He also invented the slogan: "You press the button, We do the rest." By 1896, twelve years before Henry Ford started mass-producing autos, Eastman was manufacturing cameras by the thousands, and film by the hundreds of miles. Price of the first Kodak, $25, with a $10 charge for developing, and reloading. Twelve years later, Eastman produced a "Brownie" for $1. Photography became a major U.S. fad. "Detective cameras" were disguised as ladies' handbags, muffs, briefcases. President Grover Cleveland delightedly used his Kodak all day long on a fishing trip, was dismayed to learn in the evening that he should have wound the film. The Pink Lady, a 1911 musical, had a song:
Bring along the camera,
Fetch along the camera,
Don't have any doubt about it . . .
Can't do anything without it . . .