A. Robert Kaufman and the Posographe

In this article, you can read the editorial from our latest newsletter written by Eidolon-director Róza Tekla Szilágyi, which were sent out on May 2nd, 2024. We publish our monthly editor's letters, in which we reflect on recent events, approximately two weeks after the newsletter is out.

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Hey there!

As our Eidolon Shelf project with ISBN books and gallery enters its second month we highlight Annebella Pollen’s book based on her own photo wallet collection. Wherever in the world we receive our fresh photographs they come in photo wallets. These mostly paper pouches, cheerfully illustrated envelopes depict the exact subjects we photographed in most cases: bright-eyed children, laughing couples, adorable pets, and perfect landscapes – and never the dreaded pinky or orangey shadow of the thumb. The dreaded thumb, under-, and overexposure were always something that the amateur photographer tried to work against with the guidance and sometimes unsolicited help of the developing companies (here, we should think about the quality stickers for a moment, a marker that let us know: this image is not worth looking at).

This attitude of trying to become the master of a fairly new machine is part of photography’s DNA. Last month I was able to visit the Musée Départemental Albert-Kahn in Paris – a relatively new institution showcasing the photographs and films collected by the banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn under his pacifist project called Archives de la Planète. Kahn dedicated his fortune to the creation of a vast documentation project of the world so camera operators traveled the world to record life in all its forms. The project was ongoing between 1908 to 1931 and resulted in almost 200,000 metres of film and more than 70,000 autochromes from 50 countries. To be able to deliver great imagery the camera operators needed to be masters of their equipment, and part of the museum’s temporary exhibition tells the story of this equipment and a quite clever cheat code called the Posographe. Even back in those days, there were entrepreneurs who forecasted that the everyday photographer would need an easy fix to be able to obtain the perfect negative because every faulty photograph represents a loss of time and costs. Moreover, this entrepreneur forecasted that there are enough camera users to create a new market segment.

Photo: A model for cinematography – the Posograph adapted for the Pathé-Baby 9.5 mm mechanical camera with a central hole. Source: from the Facebook page edited by Jean-Louis Aubert, the inventor's great-grandson

The Posographe was invented by an avid amateur photographer who before switching to the photography market produced award-winning motorised ride-in cars for children, and developed a tuner for violin strings. The originally Paris-born A. Robert Kaufmann was quick to receive his invention patent for the tiny device that was created to help the photographers define the perfect exposure time indicating the time of pose for photographic shots by simply sliding around six small pointers. The Posographe was developed on a trial and error process and literary research in exposure time calculation. The final product – that came in French, English, Spanish, German, and Italian – has two sides: one for indoor photography and one for the outdoors, and had sold over 100,000 units by 1933.

Photo: A. Robert Kaufmann with his Pathé-Baby camera.
Source: from the Facebook page edited by Jean-Louis Aubert, the inventor's great-grandson

In a sense the Posographe was an analogue mechanical computer because you entered some information and based on that it gave you which exposure time is to be used in the situation you were in. Our snapping mechanisms nowadays are quite different from all the smart gadgets we use: our phones adjust the exposure automatically, and with the almost endless digital storage we can almost snap as many images as we want and delete the ones we do not like without wasting physical materials. From the new metal-bodied cameras of the 1920s to the ever-connected camera network, from the one million Kodak Brownie sold in the camera’s first five years to the 45 billion cameras of 2022 one thing has not changed: no one wants to take a bad picture. And Eidolon is here to celebrate that.

Warm regards,
Róza Tekla Szilágyi
director of Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography

You can find all previous editor's letters at this link.

Highlighted photograph: Stereoscopy History