George Eastman

In Michael Kimmelman's neat little book, "The Accidental Masterpiece," there's a great chapter on the democratization of photography created by the mass production of smaller, much less expensive cameras at the turn-of-the-20th century.

"The placing in the hands of the general public a means of making pictures with but little labor and requiring less knowledge has of necessity been followed by the production of millions of photographs," wrote Alfred Stieglitz in 1899, as quoted by Kimmelman. It is due to this fatal facility that photography as a picture making medium has fallen into disrepute."

Kimmelman notes that prior to the wide popularization of cameras that tourists, for instance, would sketch the things they were seeing, forcing them to actually look and, perhaps, think about their chosen subjects.

The chapter is titled, "The Art of Being Artless."