Kodachrome, they give us those nice bright colours
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
“Kodachrome,” by Paul Simon
Dwayne’s Photo Service in Parsons is the only photo lab in the world still processing Kodachrome film. So that’s where freelance photojournalist Steve McCurry took 36 Koda-chrome slides to have prints made.
The slides were made from the last roll of Kodachrome the Eastman Kodak Company will make, an Associated Press story reports.
McCurry — he’s the man who took the picture of Sharbat Guta, the Afghan girl whose face on the cover of National Geographic in 1984 captured world attention with her piercing green eyes — asked Kodak for that last roll for sentimental reasons.
He first shot street scenes in New York City, then flew to India to photograph a tribe on the verge of extinction. “It’s actually disappearing, the same way as Koda-chrome,” McCurry said.
National Geographic magazine followed the making of that last roll from start to Parsons. It will turn it into a television show to be broadcast in the spring of 2011, the AP reported.
There will be millions, maybe hundreds of millions, around the world who will greet the demise of that wonderful film with a deep sigh and then fall into a reverie. Kodachrome came on the scene in 1935 and lasted three-quarters of a century.
Maybe it grew better as the decades went by. Truer colors, faster exposure time. But the Kodachrome slides we took when our first child was in diapers are still sharp, still charm with warm colors, still bring a smile and make it necessary to blink a couple of times and let the throat relax.
So McCurry’s sentimental journey seemed a perfectly normal reaction to me.
Over the years between 1950 and now, Mickey and I accumulated about 10,000 slides. That is not a precise count, but a close estimate made last year. It was decided then to edit the collection and have the keepers digitalized and transferred to DVDs.
It was a recognition that digital was better than color reversal film; that seeing the pictures on a television or computer screen was superior to projecting them onto a glass-beaded screen. Besides, we had gone digital with our cameras several years ago. We bought our last roll of Kodachrome (or its Fugi rival) before that decision was made early in this decade. What a difference the new technology has made to sight-seeing and the travel budget.
The memory card for our Canon 35mm holds hundreds of pictures and is weightless in a shirt pocket. It replaces 30 to 40 rolls of Kodachrome that cost several hundred dollars and would cost that much again to be made into slides and/or prints. And what a trash-creating pain to carry.
Yes, today is better. But, oh, the memories preserved in those Kodachrome years.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
