A Kodak for the Fashionable 1930's Woman

Going through one of the many boxes of cameras I came across one that immediately caught my eye.  Most cameras from the early part of the 20th century were pure form over function, and were mostly black.  It seems like camera companies were focused on putting a camera in peoples hands that worked and was easy to use rather than the look of the camera.  This seems to have changed at the end of the 1920's as Kodak decided that there was an untapped market that they needed to cater to, women.  

Kodak had been making reliable cameras since the late 1880's, starting with the original Kodak box camera and eventually morphing into folding cameras that were small enough to fit into a coat pocket.  There are multiple versions of the Kodak Vest Pocket in my grandpas collection but none as colorful as the Kodak Petite.  In 1929 Kodak released series of art deco versions of the Folding Vest Pocket camera that were marketed specifically to women.  This camera is a tiny version of the earlier Kodak folding cameras.  It takes film that is designated 127, which is a roll 46mm tall.  It creates negatives that are 4x6.5cm which is quite a bit larger than the popular 35mm size.  127 film has pretty much faded from existance, but there are a few places that you can still buy it.  There is a Canadian company that is taking Kodak film and trimming it to fit 127 roles and I have had really good results using it in a 127 film camera that I use on a pretty regular basis, I will probably do a write up on it later.  

The workings of this camera are pretty simple.  There are two settings for the shutter, I for instant and T for time allowing you to make longer exposures in lower light situations.  The aperture settings are a series of different sized holes drilled into a disk that rotates to give the lens a larger or smaller setting.  There is a very small viewfinder which you can see on the top right of the lens plate that can be rotated 90 degrees to allow the user to make landscapes or portraits.   A very cool feature of this camera is that there is a door on the back that allowed the user to record a note right onto the film, using the silver stylus.  This feature was common on many cameras through out the Kodak range at the time.  Even today I find myself wishing that I could record information about the pictures that I am taking.  An interesting thing to note about this camera is that the lens is behind the shutter, which is why you can't see any glass in the picture above.  

This camera was the camera phone of its day, not a very technical camera but with enough features to get the job done.  The size of the Vest Pocket cameras intrigues me and must have intrigued my grandpa as well since his collection has a bunch of them, this one defiantly being the most interesting and colorful.