These Are the Analog Cameras That Inspired Instagram
A brief history of the iconic photography app
The next time you fire up the Instagram app to post a masked selfie or a close-up of the food from your socially distanced car picnic, pause for a moment and take a look at the app’s logo. What do you see? The app’s logo is clearly a stylized camera.
Instagram’s logo is an amalgam of several analog film cameras, dating back to the 1950s. And the connections between today’s ‘gram and the analog cameras of yore are more than skin deep — several iconic film cameras inspired the app’s basic functionality, its format, and its very reason for existing.
In the 1960s, American photography giant Kodak had a problem. Affluent post-war Americans loved to photograph their growing families and idyllic suburban lives. But film cameras were getting more complex and more challenging for amateurs to operate. They were also getting harder to load. Amateur photographers in the 1950s would often load a roll of film, take snapshots throughout a vacation or special event, and send the film for processing, only to discover that they’d loaded their film incorrectly or set up their camera wrong, and their photos were unusable.
Wanting to sell more film and more cameras, Kodak came up with a solution. They introduced a new line…
