I’m not the first to bring up this classic Paul Simon song, but the lyrics seem appropriate:
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the worlds a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
Well … after 74 years of production, Kodachrome is going away as Kodak ceases production of its most iconic slide film.
Truth is, I never really used the film much. When I was a student, before the days of digital, I was a Provia man. Kodachrome was expensive to buy and a hassle to develop. But as a photographer, it’s impossible to ignore the quality and significance of the film used in not only still images but in movies as well.
The color positive film hit its stride in the 1950s and 60s. Historic moments such as Steve McCurry’s National Geographic cover image of an Afghan refugee girl with piercing green eyes or Abraham Zapruder’s 8mm film of the Kennedy assassination are only two of the moments immortalized in Kodachrome. In an interview with NPR, McCurry reveals that he has an archive of 800,000 images that are “as bright and vivid today as when I shot them,” he said.
And when asked what it’s like to lose the film, McCurry responds, “Sort of like a dear friend that you’re never going to see again, or a relative that’s passed away, or the kind of thing that we’ll sit around and talk about in the future.”
The historic significance of Kodachrome is unmistakable, but, much like everything else being drowned in the digital wake, the production and processing just wasn’t economically feasible for Kodak anymore. Kodak argues the film amounts to less than 1 percent of sales of still-pictures film, and according to McCurry, there is only one lab left in the world located in Kansas that processes the film.
When I think about the archival quality of slides, it reminds me of the vinyl records lining my shelves at home. I still love my vinyl and with proper care they sound as good as the day the needle cut the wax. But with the advancement in digital music, records became vintage (although more new artists are releasing vinyl records again). The similarity I see is that we are still learning the shelf life of CDs and DVDs, but the record will be there for as long as we have a player. Digital images are easy to lose track of in “storage” or can be deleted without ever seeing the light of day – film is … well, it exists … and although it can be lost or misplaced, it actually exists in hard copy.
The main difference is, while the digital innovation for music produced the same product in a supposedly higher quality, digital images have a uniquely different quality than film, especially Kodachrome.
I guess it’s only a matter of time until Photoshop comes out with a Kodachrome filter so we can give a shout out to the good ol’ days of photography.
Here are some links worth checking out:
Click here for the official news release from Kodak.
Click here for the NPR audio interview with Steve McCurry.
Click here for “A Brief History of Kodachrome in on Time.com by Claire Suddath. (I found this incredibly interesting.)
Saving the best for last, a Kodachrome slide show featuring Eric Meola, Steve McCurry and Peter Guttman on the Kodak Web site.