THE END OF KODACHROME
Jeff Jacobson:
Kodachrome, I think, was the grandest manifestation of color in film. There is nothing quite like looking at a Kodachrome slide. I mean, it’s really beautiful to sit in a dark space and project slides.
Alex Webb:
Kodachrome has a kind of rich smoothness, a sense of depth, both depth of color, and depth in terms of the sort of three-dimensional feel of it.
Jacobson:
Kodachrome is a unique process. It’s a far richer color film than anything else that’s ever been made.
Webb:
It has particularly deep blacks, particularly deep reds. It has a kind of punchy emotionality.
Jacobson:
Kodachrome also defined a whole era of how Americans thought about their life. People looked at their lives through Kodachrome, especially in post-war America, and it really defined, through the ’50s and the ’60s, what American life looked like. I started using Kodachrome in the late ’70s. I just realized pretty quickly that there’s nothing else like it.
Webb:
When I came to working in color in the late ’70s, really, in trying out different color films, the only film that made sense for me at that time, in 35 millimeter, was Kodachrome. With Kodachrome you’d have your cartridges of film, and you’d ship them directly to some Kodak facility, or drop them off at some camera store. Then the slides came back to you in yellow boxes.
Jacobson:
There’s something about opening that box, and laying those slides out…. For me, it was a magical moment.
Webb:
But usually the magic disappeared incredibly fast.
Jacobson:
And I always would just look at them first. I’d lay them out on a light table before I’d project them. I would start editing from a light table. I still do. Unfortunately, they’re not in the little yellow boxes anymore.
Webb:
There was something about the time it took, physically, to go through those, through the transparencies, and back through them. This process of making a first cut, putting part of it away, and then making another cut, and another cut, and slowly whittling it down, was very satisfying in many ways. I certainly was worried for a number of years about the possibility of the disappearance of Kodachrome, because they had been talking about it for years, and it was a slow process. I remember Jeff [Jacobson] calling me one day, and he said, “Alex, you won’t believe where I am.” And I said, “No, where are you?” And he said, “I’m in—I’m in Parsons, Kansas. I’m at Dwayne’s Photo!” you know? And then he said, “You know, it really just looks like a little mom-and-pop photo shop, but they have all this Kodachrome coming in from all over the world.” Dwayne’s Photo was the last processor of Kodachrome and processed the final roll in 2010.
Jacobson:
The market for Kodachrome clearly collapsed.
Webb:
The last major project that I completed in Kodachrome was Violet Isle (Radius Books, 2009), the Cuba book that Rebecca [photographer Rebecca Norris Webb] and I did together. In some ways, it’s kind of appropriate that Cuba be the last Kodachrome project. You think of Cuba as sort of associated with the ’50s and ’60s, and of course, Kodachrome is a film that one associates with that era.
Jacobson:
For me, the end of Kodachrome is dovetailing with a period in my life where I’ve been forced to face my own mortality, because I had cancer, and went through chemo, and then about a year later, Kodak discontinued Kodachrome 200. So the two events are related for me, but the preciousness of the remaining Kodachrome just highlights the preciousness of any remaining time I have in photography. So in that case, if they had to end Kodachrome, this was a pretty good time in my life for them to end it. It has heightened my awareness of it, I think, in a creative way, and all things end. The only constant thing in the universe is that it’s going to change. I’ll figure something else out.
Paul Messier:
I’m an art conservator specializing in photographic materials. In the middle of the 19th century, photographic papers were not commercially available. If you were a photographer and wanted to make a print, you had access to information, but you were pretty much on your own in terms of acquiring the materials locally to make a photograph. So you would start with a plain piece of paper that you would sensitize and process yourself. Relatively soon thereafter, around the mid to late 1850s, and certainly by the 1860s, a lot of different manufacturers of photographic papers appeared. And these would be albumen papers, the papers that were used to record the American Civil War, for example. And those were by and large all commercially prepared papers. For silver gelatin, the black-and-white papers, you really don’t see those appear until the latter part of the 19th century. George Eastman really believed in them, except the trouble was that he was one of the few people who really believed in them. They were very hard to use and they were not widely embraced by either amateur or professional photographers.
It was really the introduction of Velox by the Nepera Chemical Company, in the latter years of the 19th century, that pushed it over the top. It was a paper geared for amateurs primarily, but it had the right combination of all kinds of different factors to make it a commercial success. It was not too fast, and that was one of the big problems with the early-generation gelatin silver papers. They were too fast and they required a photographic darkroom. Printers didn’t print in the darkroom in the 19th century; the papers weren’t fast enough. You could very easily print in a well-lit room, and check the progress of the print as it developed without exposing the paper and ruining the print. So those papers were too fast. Velox was right. It was the right combination of speed and enough attributes of the earlier generation papers, but it was also forward-looking enough technologically, and it was a huge success. And George Eastman bought the company and popularized the paper, and soon thereafter many manufacturers started getting involved.
By the mid-teens, late teens, we start getting away from pure contact printing, and photographic printing really then fully moves into the darkroom, and you start getting enlarging papers that are specifically designed both for professional use and for amateur use. At that point you start to see the diversity of papers come in. Really around 1915, 1917, you start seeing more manufacturers in that space, you start to see them competing. And by 1925, you have this incredible diversity available to photographers that probably only increased until around World War II. The photographic manufacturers kind of devoted their efforts more to the war effort, devoted their innovations to making things faster, a little bit cheaper. And then color came in after World War II.
In retrospect it’s easy to identify that as the beginning of the end for what we conventionally know as black-and-white papers. The heyday was between the wars; that period really was the peak for the diversity of the different papers, what papers were out there. Today, we are down to a very few manufacturers and a fairly limited range of surfaces, textures, and paper varieties.
The first papers that I bought were from a little camera store in a small town in Massachusetts that was going out of business. They had a lot of Agfa sample books from over the years, and I thought, we need this in conservation. We need the materials-based understanding of 20th-century photography, and yet we were actively losing it, really quickly, with the transition to digital.
I have 5,200 or so catalogued pieces of photographic