Don't Take My Kodachrome Away
Making Movies in Yosemite National Park, California. Colorama #344 by Peter Gales, August 1970.
When the New York Central Railroad offered the Kodak company the colossal east balcony of Grand Central Terminal as advertising space in 1949, color photography represented only 2 percent of Kodak's business. But with the conversion of America's massive military/industrial power to peaceful use, the postwar economic boom brought unprecedented prosperity; the drab wartime era was quickly subsumed into a colorful world inhabited by people who had leisure time and the means to enjoy it. A shiny new suburban lifestyle emerged, accompanied by a flood of even shinier new consumer products. Kodak marketers saw the company's future in placing high-quality, easy-to-use cameras--and color print film--into the hands of millions.
The Colorama program was launched in May 1950 to promote this initiative, and became one of the most successful product-development and marketing campaigns in corporate history. At the time, however, the film, the chemistry, and the basic methods for creating 18-by-60-foot-wide backlit transparencies did not yet exist. But Kodak made an enormous leap of faith and quickly developed the technology for creating the Coloramas--and began producing a series of desirable and affordable cameras for a brand-new audience.
Kodak had already set standards for professional color imaging materials, from its dye-transfer process--much loved by advertising designers, and fine-art photographers including Eliot Porter and William Eggleston--to state-of-the-art film and processing materials for the motion picture and printing industries. Kodachrome positive-transparency film, which had been available since 1935, did not suit the average amateur photographer who wanted color prints. While it yielded brilliant, fine-grained images that made for entertaining slide shows, printmaking required professional lab services, which were costly and not readily available to most amateur shooters.
Kodak's research and development lab was given a push in their ongoing search for a viable color print film by a remarkable byproduct of World War II: when American forces seized the Agfa plant at Wolfen, near Leipzig, Germany in 1944, the U.S. government claimed the company's trade secrets for Agfacolor negative film as "war indemnity," then distributed the information to film manufacturers worldwide. Although this information was made available to Kodak's competitors, Kodak alone had the resources to run with it.
Closing a summer cottage, Quogue, New York. Colorama #126 by Ralph Amdorsky and Charles Baker, art direction by Norman Rockwell, September 1957.
The first Coloramas consisted of three photographs assembled into a single giant transparency measuring 60 feet across: a 36-foot-wide photograph flanked by two images, each 12 feet wide. The original photographs were created using 8-by10 and 4-by-5 cameras, which allowed for enlargements up to 50 times the original size without loss of detail. With a specially built enlarger, the negative was exposed onto Kodak's new Ektacolor transparent;y print film--in 41 sections, each about 20 feet long and 20 inches wide. After processing, the sections were painstakingly spliced together by hand, and joined with transparent adhesive into a single image.
With employees working 16 hour days, under tremendous pressure to produce a new Colorama every three weeks, Kodak's "Rube Goldberg operation" (as it was dubbed by Bill Foley, supervisor of the production team) was gradually refined. Making the exposures for each display was at least a full day's work in almost total darkness. Until 1963, when Kodak built a viscous chemistry processor, the giant transparencies were processed using liquid chemistry. This meant hanging the 20-foot-long wet transparencies to dry overnight in an employee recreation center--the only building on Kodak's Rochester campus large enough to accommodate Coloramas-in-the-making.
At first, everything about the film, the processing, and the assembly conspired against the result of finished images with a perfectly even tone throughout. This caused serious problems in photographs with broad expanses of blue sky --the signature of a "Kodak Moment." But the tremendous resources of the company were put to the task. Soon, improved emulsions produced finer-grained and faster films; the Colorama enlarging easel was fitted with a 1,000-watt airport runway light to produce more consistent exposures; and a better method of splicing and joining the transparency strips was developed.
Camping at Lake Placid, New York. Colorama #155 by Herb Archer, July 1959.
By the time the first display was unveiled, in May 1950, Kodak's Colorama team had solved the technical problems so skillfully that the basic production methods remained in place for the life of the program.The slow speed of the early Ektachrome film dictated the use of sophisticated lighting set ups to stop action--even in photographs shot outdoors in bright sunshine. In Camping at Lake Placid, New York (above)--a photograph meant to suggest that the viewer, too, could capture family vacation scenes like this with a simple point-and-shoot camera--hundreds of disposable flashbulbs supplied enough light to balance the color and detail in the dark foreground with the bright sky and water beyond. By 1977, the speed and fine grain of Kodak's 35 mm films allowed for enlargements that were 150,000 times the size of the original slide.
The images' distinctive panoramic format was first created two years into the program, using a dilapidated, wooden Deardorff banquet camera that took 8-by-20-inch film. The Coloramas were (until the digital age) the world's larges photographs; images 60 feet wide made from a single negative. The beat-up old camera was eventually replaced by several new, modernized Deardorff panoramics, which became tyne program's standard for the next 15 years. As improvements were made in film and processing, an array of professional and amateur cameras were also used, ranging from a custom Deardorff 5-by-10 to Kodak's disposable 35mm panoramic Stretch Camera, introduced in 1989, with just about every other type of camera imaginable in between.
Teen Dance in Basement Rec Room. Colorama #193 by Lee Howick ad Niel Montanus, 1961.
While the Coloramas' nostalgic view of the American Dream--a life drenched in color and happy times changed little over the program's 40-year run, Kodak's product development progressed at a heroic pace. Many of the new cameras--and their brand names--capitalized on space-age technology and the allure of space travel. In 1957, the year the Soviets launched Sputnik I, Kodak introduced the Starmatic family of cameras; a Christmas Colorama promotion launched the line, which became so popular that 10 million of these automatic, electric-eye cameras were sold over the next five years. In January 1967, the first photograph of the earth viewed from the moon, photographed by NASA's Lunar Orbiter I on Kodak film, filled the display at Grand Central Terminal. And in 1969, New Yorkers saw a Colorama of the first moon landing, a day before the Apollo 11 pictures were seen in the weekly news magazines. By 1972, the Instamatic Camera, of which more than 50 million head already been produced, was miniaturized to pocket size. In 1981, the company introduced Ektaflex color printmaking kits for home darkroom enthusiasts. In 1990, the year the Colorama program ended, Kodak announced the development of the Photo CD and proposed a universal system for defining color throughout the digital environment.
The very last Colorama, which was displayed from November 1989 to February 1990, is now steeped in a nostalgia that has altered the photograph's original meaning since the events of 9/121. In this picture, a glittering nighttime view of the New York City skyline features the Twin Towers, with the only digital enhancement ever created for the Colorama program--an oversize red apple nestled among the building to the towers' left. The copy that ran with the photograph reads: "Kodak thanks the Big Apple for 40 years of friendship in Grand Central."
Don't Take My Kodachrome Away, from "Picture Perfect" by Peggy Roalf; Colorama: The World's Largest Photographs (Aperture 2004).
An exhibition of 36 images from the Colorama program, at 1/12th the original size, organized by the George Eastman House, will open at the Fenimore Art Museum, in Cooperstown, New York, on May 25th.
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