Remy's Kodak Brownie Camera Collection
By James Grahame
The last Kodak Brownie Flash II camera rolled off an Australian assembly line in 1962, over six decades after the first $1 Brownie box camera was manufactured in the USA. The earliest examples of these simple cameras were made from leatherette covered cardboard. They featured a slide-off back cover which resembled a shoebox lid more than a precision photographic component. But they did the trick, and about 15,000 cameras were produced before the introduction of a hinged film door in March 1900.
The design and film format changed over the decades, although the simple boxlike design remained a comforting constant. The Brownie name lived on in name alone throughout the 1960s until the market shifted to favor Kodak's compact Instamatic cameras.
Remy Steller has compiled an impressive collection of Brownies, ranging all the way from early devices manufactured in Rochester at the turn of the 20th century to a late model flash camera outfit made in Australia in the early sixties. His site is definitely worth a visit, just to see what things were like a century before the camera phone obliterated traditional snapshot photography.
