Pressing Buttons: Kodak, Advertising Psychotechnics, and the Politics of Graphic Design, c. 1915.

This article examines the Eastman Kodak Company's early twentieth-century print advertising campaign known as "There's a photographer in your town," developed under advertising manager Lewis Bunnell (L. B.) Jones. Launched in 1912, the campaign employed minimalist, illustration-free layouts that invited consumers—primarily white, upwardly mobile picture connoisseurs—to mentally visualize their own photographic portraits, thereby activating consumer imagination as a key advertising mechanism. The campaign not only targeted consumers but also guided professional photographers in adopting consumer-oriented marketing strategies, reinforcing Kodak's market dominance and the "picture habit" as a cultural practice. The article situates Kodak's advertising within broader contexts of early advertising psychology, graphic design, and racialized visual culture, highlighting how the strategic use of blank white space functioned both as a psychological tool and as a marker of white privilege in American commercial imagery.