Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography—Kim Bell (Stanford, CA, USA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2020, 323 pp.)

The cover of Good Pictures is a visual pun that would probably be lost on anyone under the age of 30, reared on digital photography. It is a shade of yellow as unmistakable as the green on a John Deere tractor. This yellow was the color of Kodak film boxes and papers for over 100 years. But the title too is a riff on another Kodak product: How to Make Good Pictures: A Book for the Amateur Photographer. The work was first published in 1910 and went through numerous editions before expiring, with the near-death of Kodak, late in the last century. On the flyleaf of Kim Bell’s handsomely made book, we find the cover of one such early edition in the faded sepia so redolent of photography’s past.