Kodachrome

Gives us the nice, bright colors…

This week, the Kodak Company announced that it was going to discontinue the manufacture of Kodachrome film.

For anyone under the age of 40, that announcement meant absolutely nothing.

But for those of us who grew up in an earlier era, and watched the transition from film to digital, the end of Kodachrome marks the end of an era.

Film is over.

It was killed off by a faster, cheaper and easier technology – digital images.

Today, Kodachrome represents less than 1% of Kodak’s sales.  But there was a time when Kodachrome was groundbreaking.

It was invented in 1935 by two musicians, Mannes and Godowsky, and it changed the world.  It brought and captured color, whereas before, the world had been black and white.  Just watch The History Channel and catch the occasional runs of World War II in color to see the snippets of Hitler in ‘living color’.  The way the color drags the past into the present is astonishing.

Until the 50s, Kodachrome was so expensive and so difficult to process that it was used largely for motion pictures, but by the mid 50s, Kodak began to release it to amateurs.  This again changed the world.

Fast speed, easy to use color film became increasingly ubiquitous and when Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, dressmaker Abraham Zapruder was there with his 8mm camera, loaded with Kodachrome to capture the moment.

An iconic image was born.

Today, we take it for granted that when something momentous happens we will be able to ‘see’ it.  Events in Tehran, captured on iPhones or flipcams are transmitted worldwide in a matter of moments. When 9/11 struck, we turned to CNN and expected to see live images of the World Trade Center (in color) and were not disappointed.

The world was not always so, but it probably will be that way from now on.

Kodachrome captured a moment, an instant, as it really was. And for a generation that grew up with black and white images and long waits for chemical processing, that captured moment of reality had a value that now perhaps is diminished by the commonality of the event.

My father died recently and among his possessions that suddenly became mine was his collection of 35mm slides.

A few weeks ago, on a whim, I took a few out and looked at them through a hand-held viewer.

There was an image of him at 35, much younger than I am now.  Just a random moment, captured forever.

There was no aging of the image, (unlike the rest of us), and for a second I was transported back to that very moment in time.

Kodachrome.