When peace goes out of stock

Blog series Americas and Oceania Collections

Author Hadas Zahavi is a 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow and the the Founding Director of Columbia University Global Center for Peace Innovation

Few things seem less commercial than telling customers there is nothing to buy. Yet this is precisely what Kodak did in a global Second World War campaign launched when photographic film was withdrawn from civilian life for military use, a campaign that, despite its vast scale, was largely forgotten until encountered by chance during an Eccles Fellowship at the British Library. Like many private companies during the war, Kodak redirected much of its industry from leisure culture to the machinery of destruction, producing technologies that ranged from camera guns to aerial imaging systems, a conversion that for several months created a shortage of photographic film for the general public. Turning this shortage into a commercial opportunity and elevating the product’s prestige through its wartime service before its return to the shelves, the company launched an aggressive campaign that offered, this article proposes, a rare visualisation of a process commercial culture usually keeps hidden: the repeated conversion of leisure technologies into instruments of war, and back again into ordinary consumer goods.

The campaign unfolded through two complementary narratives. The first constructed a romantic and emotionally persuasive story explaining where the film no longer available in ordinary shops had gone. To do so, it cast the roll of film itself as a Kodak tourist travelling the world with a camera: only instead of returning with scenes of leisure and pleasure, it would produce images of destruction. In one advertisement, ‘Kodak Film is in the skies’. Elsewhere, it passes through mountains, over water, and across distant terrain. Yet while the film moves like the tourist, its wartime journeys are presented as more urgent than any civilian voyage, inviting the frustrated consumer to accept the shortage as necessary service. The familiar roll of film once associated with birthdays, holidays, and family albums is recast as an active participant in aerial reconnaissance, engineering surveys, military planning, intelligence work, and the occupation of territories across the globe. Accordingly, just as holidaymakers were expected to return home with photographs from their travels, Kodak suggested that film, too, would come home carrying images from the front: bombardments recorded, landscapes mapped, targets seen from above.

The second narrative visualised what this transfer prevented. One advertisement claimed that if the quantity of film supplied each year for wartime purposes were developed into album-sized snapshots, it would produce more than two billion photographs, enough to wrap around the earth more than five times. The illustration shows a parallel globe encircled by strips of cheerful miniature images of children at play, pristine landscapes, and family gatherings. Leisure photography becomes the measure of war. Yet the image reveals, against its own intentions, two archives corporate memory cannot accommodate. The first is an archive of devastation. By boasting that wartime allocations of film would yield billions of photographs, the advertisement inadvertently points to a vast visual record of destruction, victims, and ruined landscapes produced through technologies publicly associated with holidays, intimacy, and happiness while serving the machinery of war. Yet such images are nowhere to be found in the corporate archive accessible to the public built to preserve the brand’s association with leisure, family life, and pleasure.The second is rarer still: an archive of images never taken because the moments themselves were prevented from taking place. In the advertisement, the neat strips of charming snapshots encircling the globe; scenes of children playing, family gathering, and pristine landscapes, were meant to represent the photographs civilians could not take because film had disappeared from shop shelves, thereby giving visible scale to the quantities absorbed by wartime demand. Yet what is counted here is not only the leisure photography shortage created by military use, but a visualisation of the moments the war itself, and Kodak’s participation in its visual infrastructures, made impossible to live, let alone photograph. By turning cheerful snapshots into a measure of military production, Kodak inadvertently have created an unprecedented modern archive of absence itself.

Wartime Kodak ads promise consistently that peace will soon return, and with it the Kodak film sent away on its wartime journey, coming home improved by service. Read now, that reassurance feels less like a historical curiosity than an early script for the present. In Kodak’s day, film made visible something digital culture often obscures: images depend on limited resources that can be redirected, rationed, or withheld. A roll could run out; it could also be requisitioned for war. Today photographs appear weightless and inexhaustible, endlessly produced and instantly shared, yet the systems that sustain them remain deeply material: extracted minerals, underpaid labour, electrical grids, data centres, satellites, and logistics chains stretched across the globe. Scarcity has not vanished. It has merely been moved out of sight. So too has the conversion of peaceful life into military capacity. Cameras sold for holidays can guide drones, mapping tools built for convenience can assist targeting and border control, social platforms designed for connection can circulate propaganda, and cloud infrastructures marketed as ordinary utilities can sustain armed power. As in Kodak’s wartime campaign, the public is assured that what war demands today will return tomorrow as civilian progress. Yet the balance sheet tells another story: not only destruction elsewhere, but homes never built, hospitals never funded, climates never repaired, and ordinary futures lost before they could ever become images. Preserved today in the collections of the British Library, where corporate archives are so often donated in forms most flattering to those who produced them, we are left to turn commercial images themselves into tools of resistance against the worlds they were made to sell.