In Kodak City, Catherine Leutenegger turns her camera on Rochester, New York, where Eastman Kodak’s headquarters and factories once anchored the local economy. Her subject is not simply an abandoned industrial complex, but the altered relationship between a company, a city, and the medium that made both internationally consequential. The photographs encompass Kodak’s grounds and surviving factory structures as well as Rochester itself.

The history behind these images gives the project unusual resonance. Kodak helped shape photography from the late nineteenth century through much of the twentieth, and the first electronic camera was developed in one of its laboratories. Yet the company failed to negotiate the transition to digital imaging and eventually entered bankruptcy. Rochester, long bound to Kodak as an economic engine, consequently became a revealing site in which technological change could be read through buildings and civic space.

Leutenegger approaches this charged material with restraint. Her photographs are observational and deliberately understated, allowing corporate remnants and the wider city to occupy the same field of inquiry. Rather than reducing Rochester to an emblem of ruin, she examines how industrial decline becomes embedded in an everyday environment. The resulting work connects architectural evidence with economic history while also turning photography back upon its own changing technological foundations.

Published by Kehrer Verlag in 2014, this first-edition hardcover extends across 160 pages. For collectors concerned with industrial landscapes, American company towns, documentary practice, or the history of photographic technology, its importance rests in the precision of that convergence. Kodak City records the afterlife of a photographic empire through the city that depended upon it, making the book both a study of place and a self-reflexive account of the medium’s passage from analogue dominance into the digital era.