Cotton and Silver: Eastman Kodak and the Racialized Materials of Photography

In 1920, the Kodak Magazine described the key materials for manufacturing photographic film: in addition to light-sensitive silver salts, the process required “bales and bales of cotton” for roll film’s celluloid backing. As the corporation’s anonymous writer concluded, “A darky in the cotton field today may be...pulling the cotton for his next season’s shirt, or for a motion picture film he will later see produced when he goes to town.” Kodak’s racial slur and equation of cotton with the labor of Black bodies makes clear that all photographs and films produced in the early twentieth-century United States—not only photographs and films with overtly racialized content—were, on a material level, “Jim Crow images.” All depended upon the racialized land and labor exploitation that subtended cotton production in the United States' plantation South and elsewhere.

Through a close reading of Kodak’s corporate publications in the early twentieth century, this paper seeks to position cotton and Black labor as, quite literally, the material grounds for photographic visibility in the twentieth century’s emerging image economy. Following Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Tina Campt, and Thy Phu, I recontextualize photographic production within material histories of racialized extraction and industrial capitalism, centering questions of labor, materiality, and affect. While art historians writing about race and vision have tended to focused on specific cultural artifacts such as the White supremacist film Birth of a Nation (1915), this paper argues that the full significance of the “Jim Crow image” lies in excess of its racialized content, even of visuality itself.