Rochester, 1888 — and a lake, and a Tuesday

The camera costs twenty-five dollars and comes loaded with a hundred exposures. You cannot open it. You cannot develop it. When the roll is finished you post the entire camera back to Rochester and they return it to you reloaded, with your prints, circular, two and a half inches across. The slogan is: you press the button, we do the rest.

It is the first machine that lets a person who knows nothing keep a picture of an afternoon.

Within twenty years the family album exists as an institution. Within forty, a childhood without photographs of it is a poor childhood. Within a hundred, a child is photographed several thousand times before the age at which continuous memory begins, and the photographs are shown to the child, and the child assembles a past out of them and calls it remembering.

The research on this is not ambiguous. Show an adult a convincing photograph of an event that did not occur — a balloon ride, a birthday — and a substantial fraction will, within three sessions, produce a detailed first-person recollection of it, with weather in it, and sounds, and how they felt.

They are not lying and they are not unusual. They are doing the thing memory does, with the materials memory was given.

We do the rest. It was on the box. Nobody read it as a description of what was being taken over.