Six-20 Brownie E Camera

A Six-20 Brownie Model E box-roll film camera, made by Kodak Limited. Includes canvas case and instruction leaflet.

Kodak Brownie cameras were some of the earliest affordable and easy to use cameras.

Although photography was invented in the first half of the 19th century, it was a complicated and expensive activity at first. In 1900, the Kodak company introduced the Brownie, a cheap and simple box camera. The Brownie put photography into the hands of millions of everyday people for the first time, allowing them to easily take snapshots of their daily lives and their families and friends. The name is thought to have been a reference to cartoons of Brownies, a type of folklore spirit, in children’s books by Palmer Cox.

The Brownie was a huge success, with over 100,000 sold in the first year of production. They were followed by millions of improved Brownie branded cameras made over the following decades, which were manufactured in several countries, including Britain. Over the years Kodak produced many different models of Brownie, adding new features and using new materials. Although later model Brownies were quite different to the first ones, they continued to be quite simple cameras, affordable, and marketed to amateur photographers.

In the early 1930s Kodak introduced the Six-20 range of Brownie cameras, so-called because they used the new 620-film. The Six-20 Brownie retained the classic box camera shape of earlier Brownies, but had several improvements – a sturdier metal body and a close-up lens for portraits as well as the standard lens. They were popular and easy to use cameras, which were produced until the later 1950s with slight differences of style and features between different models. This particular Six-20 Brownie E was made in the early 1950s, when it would have cost about £2 and 10 shillings, making it one of the cheaper cameras Kodak offered.