Mama’s Taken My Kodachrome Away!
The end of a photographic institution raises questions about the cost of the digital revolution
A PHOTOGRAPHER once summed up the importance of the film he used by saying, and I paraphrase, “If you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out.” What you got from Kodachrome, the first successful colour film, a favourite among amateurs and photojournalists alike for over 70 years, and the subject of a hit Paul Simon song, was a striking richness of colour and sharpness of detail that was hard to match. It was also robust enough to withstand the extreme climates in which the photojournalists sometimes worked.
That did not save it from the digital revolution, however, and Kodak’s announcement that it would cease production of Kodachrome in 2009 led photographers to stock up on the film in large numbers. Its decision has cast doubt on whether photographic film itself will survive for much longer.
The final 36 frames to come off the production line were bequeathed to Kodachrome’s biggest fan, Steve McCurry, revered Magnum photographer, who has an archive of over 800,000 pictures taken with the film. His picture in 1984 of an Afghan girl in a refugee camp made the cover of National Geographic and became world-famous. His pictures using the last roll of Kodachrome were the subject of a bittersweet exhibition this summer at Istanbul Modern, Turkey’s premier art gallery, and can also be viewed in their entirety on his website.
McCurry spent nine months planning what to do with the precious 36. He set off first to photograph Brooklyn bridge and other iconic buildings in New York, but found it difficult to get the ball rolling, partly because of the cloudy weather. Portraits would give him more control of the images, so he contacted Paul Simon, whose 1973 tribute to Kodachrome includes the lines: “You give us those nice bright colors, You give us the greens of summers, Makes you think all the world's a sunny day/Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away”. The song played constantly in the background at the exhibition – in fact, by the end of my visit, I was half hoping that it would be consigned to the history books as well. Simon declined to pose, and later Robert De Niro was contacted. He gave McCurry 30 minutes and the session got the photographer going.
McCurry then went to India, where he photographed Bollywood film stars and members of a tribe whose traditions are going the way of Kodachrome. He took digital photos first to test the light and composition before going for it with his tripod-mounted Nikon F6 and hoping that his subject would not blink. He stopped off in Istanbul to take a picture of Ara Güler, the “eye of Istanbul”, whose eyes we look into for a change – McCurry’s subjects often stare unnervingly right into the lens of the camera. Then he returned to New York and took a photo of fellow Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt posing with a yellow lampshade on his head and a red t-shirt — Kodak’s colours, which turn up regularly in different images. McCurry’s tired feet are featured in another pic. The final shot is in Parsons cemetery, Kansas, of a statue looking forward to another world. Parsons is the home of Dwayne's Photo, the last lab in the world that could develop the film.
So Kodachrome is gone and it looks like photographic film will follow the way of the Daguerreotype and the Talbotype, photographic processes that produced beautiful images, but were passed over for more efficient techniques. Are we still mourning them 100 years on? No, and perhaps we won’t be mourning the loss of film in 100 years’ time, but the once universal medium is under threat of extinction and perhaps it is time to think about the implications.
In McCurry’s first frame, De Niro’s face is made up of hundreds of tiny brown, yellow and pink dots, a grainy textural quality that is often ironed out in the digital process. There are also white patches and strips in the background – random imperfections, in contrast to digital photography, where every pixel can be adjusted by the artist.
At least with McCurry’s images, you can be sure that he met and engaged with his sitters in creating his collection and saying something about their lives. You do not have that confidence when looking at digital images, and although digital has opened a seemingly endless series of possibilities in image making, the rituals that we associate with the dark room or the local photo lab are being lost. A film that has been made of McCurry’s odyssey shows his excitement as he waits for the photos to come out at Dwayne’s. That sense of anticipation is lacking in the digital process. However, I am sure he could have done without the machine jamming temporarily as the film went through. A swift whack, and it started working again. There are some things about the analogue world that we won’t miss.
The film also shows De Niro’s incredulity that this is the very last Kodachrome film to come off the production line. The change seems to have happened without our noticing it. McCurry’s pictures make us reflect on that development and ask whether the gains of the digital revolution are worth the losses.
Steve McCurry’s photos can be viewed at http://www.stevemccurry.com/main.php. Click on Galleries and then scroll down to Last Roll.
Details of the Istanbul Modern exhibition “The Last Roll of Kodachrome” can be found at http://www.istanbulmodern.org/en/f_index.html