The Endangered and the Extinct
PHOTOGRAPHY IS ALWAYS CHANGING
Eric Taubman
It starts in 1839 with the daguerreotype, which is an image on silver-plated copper. That was really the first process, around the same time as the calotype process by Henry Fox Talbot, which is a paper negative process. Very beautiful, very different, and these are things that still can be done now. It’s tricky, the materials are not always easy to get. But the more people that do it, the more reasons there are for manufacturers to keep the materials available. Those were the processes for the next 20 years. But toward the end of that 20-year period was a bit of an overlap with the discovery of wet-plate collodion, which came in around 1853. That was a process more geared toward the masses. At that point, many people decided that they could do photography, and there were packaged kits available. And so it was photography available to a larger world. Its heyday was from the early 1850s through about the early 1870s.
The wet-plate collodion process is a process using the substance collodion, which is also referred to as gun cotton, or nitrocellulose. And it’s basically a glue, or a binder. Collodion comes from the Greek word for glue. And it’s a glue-like material, or syrupy material that you pour onto either glass or tin. The wet-plate collodion process is really related to three types of products: the tintype, which was a positive image on tin; the ambrotype, a positive on glass; and then a glass negative, for printing.
The wet-plate collodion process existed, in some form, right through the 1930s. Because it was an instantaneous process, there was a place for it much after its heyday, 1870. By then, dry plate came along, and that was kind of a revolution, because you didn’t need to shoot the plate wet in the camera, or have your whole darkroom with you wherever you went to shoot. It was on glass, but you could shoot your picture and then take it back to the darkroom, or send it out to somebody to develop. No muss, no fuss. That’s the beginning of that. And that was the precursor to film, which was flexible-base roll film, multiple exposures on a roll. The rest is history. We all kind of know it: black-and-white roll film, color, Kodachrome came in, during the 1930s, 1940s….
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
