Kenneth Grange who has died just a few days after his 95th birthday was one of Britain's most significant postwar industrial designers. For thirty years he was design consultant for Kodak Limited developing cameras and a range of other products during the 1950s-1980s. These included the Kodak Instamatic 33, the Brownie Vecta, and Kodak Brownie 44A and 44B, Pocket Instamatic cameras, and the Kodascope 40 projector. The Brownie 44A, Kodaslide 40 and Vecta won Design Centre Awards in 1960, 1961 and 1964 respectively.
He told The Guardian in 2011 about his work for Kodak. "I couldn't yet make a living from product design, so I was working doing the displays for the Kodak pavilion at the World Trade Fair. I was arranging the products on the stand and someone overheard me say, 'It's a shame these are so ugly; I could make this really good if they weren't.' The next day, the phone rang. It was the head of development at Kodak, and he said, 'I understand you're going to design a camera for us.' It was thrilling, but I was scared, too, because I didn't know cameras. But again, there was an element of luck involved. I just happened to be in the right place at the moment when Kodak decided to start selling cameras for profit. Up until this point, their cameras were sold at a loss in order to shift film."
Away from photography Grange was responsible for a range of product designs including the Kenwood Chef food processor, the Manganese Bronze London taxi and the HST 125 train.
An exhibition about Grange and his work - Kenneth Grange - Designing Modern Britain - was held at the Design Museum in 2011 and reported on in BPH.
His archive is now housed at the V&A Museum, London, gifted by Grange in 2022. In an interview at the time of its acquisition Grange noted 'Another favourite commission and one of my most successful designs was the Kodak Instamatic camera 55x. The basic invention was brilliant and was a breakthrough which made loading film into a personal camera much simpler and more straightforward. My role was to decide what visual characteristic this new camera would have, and I felt it should owe something to the long history of photography. The most expensive camera at the time was the Leica Camera – it had a particular shape to it that had become the definitive shape and way of using a camera. This new camera I was designing for Kodak owed its lineage to the Leica and is how the shape came about.'
See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Grange and https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1194586/kodaslide-40-slide-projector-slide-projector-grange-kenneth/ and https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jul/17/kenneth-grange-british-design-exhibition
Main image: Michael Pritchard / Kodak Instamatic 33. Left: Brownie Vecta camera
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BBC Radio 4's Front Row interviewed Sir Kenneth Grange at his home in April. The whole programme is available on iPlayer here: FRONT ROW 22 Apr 2024