How Instagram Became The New Kodak

Once called ‘a Kodak moment’, the perfect picture nowadays is found on Instagram, writes COLIN CULLIS. And the company’s growth to more than a billion users in just eight years is remarkable

- Colin Cullis

What started with a picture of a street in Paris 181 years ago has become a deluge. Taking a picture is now so pervasive that the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has created a word to reflect our desire to capture fleeting moments – morii. It is almost as if, without the picture, it was not real or did not happen.

From photography’s invention in the 1830s, the next century saw about a billion photos taken. Instagram in 2016 saw 95 million images posted every day. A century’s worth of photos posted every ten days.

The credit for the shift belongs to Steven Sasson, the person who arguably did as much for photography as its original pioneers and George Eastman’s Kodak company. In 1975, Sasson invented the digital camera, although his first model took 23 seconds to produce an image that was black and white and had a resolution of just 0.01 megapixels.

A contemporary smartphone has between 12 and 20 megapixels, with professional cameras now able to capture an image at an incredible 100 megapixels. Far more than the human eye can see.

Sasson worked for Kodak and, for all the developing the company was known for, it seems crazy that they did not develop the idea. It is worth noting though that, when the first model was created, Kodak owned 90 per cent of the photographic market for processing and more than 80 per cent in camera sales.

The reliance on Kodak’s lucrative legacy business was a mistake, but at the time digital did not look like a threat or even a real product. When Kodak did try to switch it was too little too late; in 2012, two years after the founding of Instagram, Kodak filed for bankruptcy. ‘A Kodak moment’ now refers to the point when traditional businesses get replaced by digital ones.