By Ernst Haas

East­man Kodak announced this morn­ing that it will cease the man­u­fac­ture of Kodachrome this year.

Cel­e­brated in song (lit­er­ally!) and story, Kodachrome is the old­est film in pro­duc­tion and the longest-lived film prod­uct in the entire his­tory of pho­tog­ra­phy. Devel­oped by Leopold Godowsky and Leopold Mannes (known as “God and Man” within Kodak) in 1935, Kodachrome had excep­tion­ally low con­trast (a good thing in a trans­parency film) and an inim­itably rich, beau­ti­ful color palette. For decades it was by far the best color mate­r­ial extant. Among other things, for many years around mid-century it rel­e­gated fam­i­lies to long ses­sions in dark­ened rooms with a slide pro­jec­tor and a screen, the best way peo­ple had of show­ing each other their vaca­tion and birth­day party pic­tures. Many lead­ing pho­tog­ra­phers even today, includ­ing Sam Abell, William Albert Allard, and Steve McCurry, did much of their impor­tant early work on Kodachrome.

How­ever, it is inher­ently slow and very dif­fi­cult to man­u­fac­ture, and dev­il­ishly intri­cate to process. Only one lab in the world is cur­rently pro­cess­ing it—Dwayne’s in Kansas, USA. The best arti­cle about Kodachrome was pub­lished in Pop­u­lar Pho­tog­ra­phy and reprinted in the book The Best of Pop­u­lar Pho­tog­ra­phy. (I should be able to pro­vide issue and page num­ber, but I can’t seem to put my hands on it.) Many film users—including avowed Kodachrome fans—have moved away from it in recent years. It cur­rently accounts for less than 1% of Kodak’s shrink­ing film sales.

It might have been ’97 or ’98 that I first wrote about the com­ing demise of Kodachrome, in the pages of Photo Tech­niques, at the time Kodak sus­pended in-house pro­cess­ing ser­vices. If mem­ory serves, how­ever, Kodak promised back then to con­tinue man­u­fac­tur­ing the film for at least ten more years. It kept that promise.

God and Man, inven­tors of Kodachrome. I own a large dye trans­fer print of this pic­ture, but I’ve never been sure who was who. I think Godowsky is at the piano. (Thanks to Helen Bach.)

This end was inevitable, but it was cer­tainly a fine long run! Not for noth­ing is the press around the world this morn­ing call­ing Kodachrome “one of the iconic prod­ucts of the 20^th century.”

Bravo to God, Man, Kodachrome, Kodak, and “those nice, bright col­ors.” R.I.P.

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