"
Here in my Car," sang Gary Numan in 1979, "
I feel safest of all".
Little did Gary Numan know that, in September of 2009,
Kodak would cease to manufacture Kodachrome slide film. And after the end of 2010 there will be nowhere in the world that can process it. Other slide films will live on, but not Kodachrome. If you want to take pictures with Kodachrome, there are only fifteen months left. I must remind myself to edit this part of the article and thin out my overuse of the word
Kodachrome. Imagine if I was delivering this as a speech and I had to say
Kodachrome several times in the space of a few seconds. It would be bad form, and also it is hard to say the word
Kodachrome without spitting. It's full of hard K-sounds and plosives. And yet it is a great name. You might not know what it is, and you might not have used it, but you know the name. In that respect Kodachrome is very much like the hypothalamus. You might not know what it is, and you might not have used it, but you know the name.
It has been a long time since I photographed things with film, so I went out and bought a few rolls of Kodachrome to see what it was like. My feeling is that I have plenty of time to take pictures with other types of film, but only a few months to shoot with Kodachrome. If I do not do it now, I will never do it. My intention was to take a few snapshots of England, but the summer of 2009 has been uniformly dull and dank, without a single sunny day. The Met Office promised us a "barbecue summer",
but either they were lying or they were mistaken. Perhaps the government told them to lie so as not to depress us. Whatever the reason, England has failed me once again, and so I went to Italy and took my pictures there instead, in Bergamo and Venice and on Lake Como. And then I came back to England and the weather was nice, so I took some more pictures. Here's one of them:
There remains one last summer of Kodachrome, and beyond that there is the void. One last chance to capture the running of the bulls at Pamploma; one last running of the tar barrels at Ottery St Mary; the sun will strike Stonehenge once more on the Autumn equinox; there will be one final chance to photograph Lindsay Lohan blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. One day, a few years from now, someone will say the same about film in general. There will come a final year and a final month and a final second, perhaps not tomorrow, but it will happen.
It would be romantic to think of all the cameras of the world falling silent for a few minutes when the last roll of Kodachrome is placed in a museum, but that will not happen. The few film cameras that are still around will continue to click and whir their shutters as they devour colour negative film and a few rolls of Fuji Velvia; the vast mass of digital cameras will continue to make electronic clicking and whirring noises in imitation of the film cameras; and the cellphones and video cameras will continue to make whatever sound it is they make as they capture video.
Kodachrome is a type of slide film, made by Kodak in various forms since 1935. It was developed in America, so that American men could photograph their wives dressed in polka dot skirts standing in front of the family Cadillac in the endless sunshine days of America. It was devised so that Americans could photograph their loved ones
on holiday in Venice. It was not intended for the overcast English summer. Kodak continued to tweak the film up until the mid 1970s, at which point development slowed to a crawl, and the film crossed the line that separates the living from the dead. Kodachrome remained in production for many years after that, but it was no longer the most popular slide film, not even the most popular Kodak slide film. Slide film has always been a niche product, even in the heyday of film. Nowadays 35mm film in general is a niche, and slide film is a very small niche within a niche, and Kodachrome is an infinitesimally tiny niche within a niche within a niche, so it had to go.
The resulting
flurry of publicity has probably helped Kodak get rid of their remaining stocks of the film, and probably revived interest in Kodak's film in general, although I question the wisdom of basing a marketing strategy on news of failure and termination and death. Not even funeral parlours base their marketing strategies on failure and termination and death.
Kodachrome is famous for three things. Firstly, Paul Simon wrote a song about it. There are few things I hate more than Paul Simon. It pleases me to think that he will die during my lifetime, him and his entire generation. I hate him and all that he represents. I will not speak of him any more. Secondly, Kodachrome is famous because it has recently been discontinued. For several decades it was the default professional colour slide film in the Western world, until displaced by Kodak's faster and simpler Ektachrome, and Fuji's more saturated and simpler Velvia. Thirdly, it is famous because of Steve McCurry's Afghan Girl. Kodak has rustled up
a gallery of Kodachrome photographs in tribute to the film, and based on that gallery I can confidently state that the one and only famous image taken with Kodachrome is Steve McCurry's Afghan Girl. 74 years and tens of thousands of shots have produced one classic image.
But
what an image. It is haunting, simultaneously fake and real. A posed, polished portrait of a real person intended from the outset to look awesome rather than to express a fundamental truth. McCurry could have photographed a woman scarred by shell fragments or wizened from malnutrition... and perhaps he did, but the audience, ourselves, would prefer to gaze at the Afghan girl as she gazes at us. She doesn't gaze, though. Gazing is passive. Her eyes are weapons, they pierce. 74 years and tens of thousands of shots were required to capture this one timeless image, and it was worth it, all the time and money.
Generally, when a film is discontinued, all is not lost. There is nothing to stop photographers from stockpiling the film in their refrigerators and plucking out a roll as and when required. Most slide film uses a development process called E-6, which is widely practised by photo labs, if not at the local supermarket then at least by mail order. Even if E-6 was to be no longer offered commercially, dedicated amateurs could still develop E-6 slide film at home, assuming they had access to the appropriate chemicals.
In contrast, Kodachrome uses a complicated optical-chemical procedure called K-14, which requires a combination of staged development and re-exposure with coloured filters during the development process. As of 2009 the only place in the world that processes Kodachrome is called
Dwayne's Photo, in Kansas. The rolls I shot in Europe had to be posted to a Kodak lab in
Lausanne, Switzerland, where they were posted to Dwayne's Photo in Kansas, where they were processed and cut up and put into cardboard mounts, and then posted back to Kodak's lab in Switzerland, where they were posted back to me here in overcast, stinking England, full of fat ugly old people buzzing around in electric wheelchairs.
The lab in Switzerland used to process Kodachrome, but it doesn't any more. I surmise that it is just an empty office with jiffy bags and a few employees who take things out of the jiffy bags that come through the post and put them into jiffy bags and post them off. They must have nightmares about jiffy bags. They must have nightmares that their lab is the entire world, and that the outside world does not exist, or that the whole thing is a metaphor. Perhaps the Kodak lab in Lausanne is actually heaven, and the jiffy bags contain our souls. They are posted to Kansas, and they come back, transformed. I picture the lab, based high in the Swiss mountains, overlooking Lake Geneva, with not a soul in sight except for mountain goats.
There are places that will develop older films - in the UK there is
Process C-22, and no doubt others - but not Kodachrome. I surmise that the optical part of the development process requires a very special and large and complicated machine, which in my mind's eye resembles the
giant multiplane cameras used by Disney to make the different layers of the background in
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves move independently, thus creating a three-dimensional parallax effect. Dwayne's Photo has such a machine. I wonder what they will do when Kodak stops sending them the necessary chemicals? Will they smash the machine, put it on eBay?
As chance would have it, Kodak's announcement of the end of Kodachrome came just sixteen months after Polaroid's announcement that they would no longer produce Polaroid instant film. The two films were aimed at different markets - Polaroid was aimed at people who wanted to take pictures of themselves naked, whereas Kodachrome was not sexy - and they are technically very different. There is
an ongoing project to revive Polaroid production, which is doomed to failure. So far no-one has come forward to save Kodachrome. I suspect that if Dwayne's Photo and Kodak cannot make money from it, no-one can. Then again, Kodak would probably find it hard to make money from a hole in the ground filled with money.
This is the end of part one. In part two I will talk about Kodachrome's place in history, and in part three I will briefly discuss the technical aspects of how I shot and scanned the film. If you can't wait that long, Kodachrome is currently available in the UK from Boots, as part of a "three films for the price of two" offer. It's relatively expensive, at about £12 a roll, but on the other hand the processing costs are included. It takes a fortnight or so for the film to come back. NB there are other shops in the UK apart from Boots.
This is greatly sized down from the original image, which is available at this National Geographic blog post from the nice people at National Geographic who will hopefully not set their lawyers on me for using a properly attributed, low-res copy of an image for the purposes of commentary. The image was part of an exhibition that the National Geographic organised in Washington DC to celebrate Kodachrome and commemorate its passing.
The light is different and there is a big empty space where the people should be, and so the image seems very dull. I believe I was almost on exactly the same spot, but I was back and to the left, and using a lens with a wider field of view (an Olympus 24mm mounted on an Olympus OM-10). The chairs are in the same place, but they are more colourful.
When Ardean and Norma Miller visited Venice, there were probably more Venetians than non-Venetians in the square, which looks almost empty behind them. There is a man in a white shirt strolling confidently up to them, curious as to what is going on. When I visited Venice I suspect that the Venetians were all on holiday. It is one of those cities where the house prices are so high that cleaners and binmen and waiters and so forth cannot afford to live there. I imagine that eventually Venice will one day be filled with ageing old rich people who will eventually have to be bricked up in their houses because they will be too senile to function as human beings but, with new technology and medicine, they will be unable to die. And they'll have to get Sean Connery to penetrate the vortex and smash the tabernacle and what-have-you.
