Kodachrome Film
American · Kodachrome 1935–2010
Invented by two professional musicians, manufactured for seventy-four years, and so chemically complicated that only a handful of laboratories in the world could ever process it. The last roll was developed in 2010.
Origin
Leopold Godowsky Jr and Leopold Mannes, both classical musicians who had experimented with colour photography since school, developed the process and were hired by Kodak to complete it. It launched in 1935 for cine film and in 1936 for stills. It documented the mid-twentieth century — the Farm Security Administration colour work, National Geographic, Ernst Haas, Steve McCurry's Afghan Girl — and its discontinuation in 2009 was a widely reported cultural event.
Technique
Unlike every other colour film, Kodachrome contains no colour couplers in the emulsion. The film is essentially three layers of black-and-white emulsion, each sensitive to a different third of the spectrum, and the dyes are added during processing — the K-14 process re-exposes each layer separately with coloured light and develops it with a different developer, in a sequence of around thirty steps. This is why it could not be home-processed and why, as demand fell, the process died with the last laboratory rather than gradually.
The palette
Saturated, contrasty and warm, with a distinctive rendering of reds and a slightly cool blue. Because the dyes are added in processing rather than sitting in the emulsion, they are unusually pure and the film is exceptionally sharp and fine-grained. Its colour signature is specific enough that photographers chose it for particular subjects: rich reds and skin tones, a deep saturated blue sky, and a characteristic overall warmth that reads as memory to anyone who grew up seeing family slides.
Legacy
Its dark-storage stability is outstanding — Kodachrome slides from the 1940s retain their colour where contemporaneous Ektachrome has shifted badly — though it fades faster than most films under projection. The film is the reason a large part of the twentieth century is remembered in a particular set of hues, and the Paul Simon song is a reasonable summary of what it did to people.
Palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.