ROCHESTER.- A section on Kodak showcases the cameras that changed the world, including the first Kodak, the first folding pocket camera, the first auto exposure camera and, of course, the Brownie. A selection of the most fascinating objects in the collection features, among other items, a lunar orbiter, a Technicolor movie camera, and "detective" cameras from the 1880s. "The exhibition really explores the depth and breadth of the collection," explains Gustavson. "There’s something in there to interest everyone, even people not previously familiar with photographic technology."

For well over a century, in every social and cultural crevice, the camera has accumulated a massive deposit of photographs. Photography is a seeing machine. Individual and collective visual memory is so much the product of this medium that we are scarcely aware whether we know the look of things because of direct seeing or as a result of a photographic image.

The fundamentals of camera design have remained little changed for more than a hundred and sixty years, except for the progression of optical and film technology and complementary accessories, like lenses and lighting devices. During its first forty years, the camera and the arduous picture-making processes that accompanied it, was used by intrepid professional practitioners and determined amateurs. The introduction of the handheld Kodak in 1888 by George Eastman proved revolutionary, placing the camera in the hands of the ordinary person, without regard to skill or experience. By the twentieth century, the camera was a commonplace device, at home in a scientist's laboratory, a portraitist's studio, a director's movie set, the photojournalist's knapsack, and the car of a family on vacation.

Today, the camera and its related technologies continue to profoundly affect photography and its multitude of users. Replacing traditional film technology, new digital cameras constituted a radical change in the capture, output, and dissemination of images and informational content. In the innovative world of imaging, a widely used term distinguishing the progressive leap from an old to a new era of photography―picture-making and picture-sharing is as near as the family computer, the personal digital assistant, and cellular phone. Rapidly and irrevocably, digital technologies are reshaping the how, what, when, and where of picture-making, although not necessarily the why, constituting a major reconfiguration of the role pictures―and the camera―play in our public and private lives. However what remains a constant in this process of technological change is that we, not cameras, are the Machines of Memory.