Kodachrome Requiem
Last week’s announcement that Eastman Kodak would “retire” Kodak film left many photographers feeling nostalgic, although few apparently still were purchasing the product. Its passing deserves far more than a quick refrain of Paul Simon’s Kodachrome song although younger generations may be left to wonder if another technology is taking their JPEGs, TIFFs, and GIFs away.
We take more photographs than ever before, thanks in part to the fact that photography, sans film and processing costs, has become almost free. But this comes at a price: while the earliest photographs (the word photograph means “light images”) such as Daguerreotypes and ambrotypes are still visible to the naked eye today, many photographs taken within the past 25 years since the advent of electronic photography outside of the laboratory are no longer accessible.
I first realized this in 1999 and 2000 when I was researching information for the Filmless Photography chapter of the book I co-authored, The History of Photography. Some of NASA’s earliest pictures of earth have long since become inaccessible. Digital file standards come and go (try opening up a WordStar or early WordPerfect file on your laptop today). So little had been written about electronic photography’s early days that my book turned out to be the first book on photography’s history to document that facet. (The era of still-video cameras, the first generation of filmless cameras that launched in the 1980s, seems to be all but forgotten – we have the first two still-video cameras, the Canon RC-701 (ca. 1984) and the Canon RC-760 (ca. 1987) in The Spira Collection as well as many other cameras that followed in that category but I doubt I could easily retrieve any images still stored within).
The first consumer-grade color digital camera, the Apple QuickTake (who here didn’t know Apple made cameras?) came with QuickTake software on a 3.5″ diskette. The diskette will certainly be an historical curiosity by the year 2011. The first professional digital camera, the Kodak DCS (ca. 1991), which was built on a Nikon F3 body and the first digital camera to take images of any reasonable quality (the first digital camera to be sold, the Dycam Model 1, produced images that were suitable for newspaper-quality halftones up to 5×4″), came with a digital storage unit (DSU) that contained a 200 MB hard drive that could hold 160 images. The Spira Collection has the Kodak and Apple cameras as well – I suppose I should, in the interest of science, plug them in and see what I find.
I’ll leave you with the final two sentences from The History of Photography: “There will always be some form of recording light images; it is a science that has taken centuries to evolve. What shape it will take in the future has yet to be determined, but each technological advance in photography has served to broaden and deepen its reach.”
Jonathan B. Spira is the CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.
July 2nd, 2009 15:08
The issue of durability of cultural media is of extreme concern, especially to librarians who are not unfamiliar with books, some published more than 500 years ago, which can still be paged through (carefully) and read today.
It’s one thing to just point out that we COULD migrate recordings to new physical support media, but quite another to realize how massive that job becomes as the amount of recorded data mushrooms.
I’ve got physical disk cartridges, punched cards, magnetic tapes, and so forth less than forty years old, where already it’s not clear that I would ever be able to read the data from those media again.
The same kinds of concerns apply to various video formats (U-matic, Beta, Technicolor, RCA CED, laserdiscs, and so forth). When the last player for that format quits working, media recorded in that format become all but unrecoverable.
Even color photographic prints and slides have problems with color fading and shifting… and that’s over relatively short timeframes.
Other than preservationists and archivists busying themselves maintaining and updating formats, to maintain these collections (and on a constantly ballooning media collection!), I’m not sure that there is a good solution to these problems.
July 2nd, 2009 17:14
This is in a way a chicken or egg question, namely, how much did Kodachrome sales fall off before Kodak began to make processing more difficult to obtain? Historically, Kodak seems to have been trying to kill off Kodachrome ever
since the announcement of Ektachrome c.1946. In fact, they did discontinue Kodachrome in sheet film sizes at that time much to the disgust of commercial photographers. While Ektachrome did not have to be sent to Rochester for
processing it was inferior to Kodachrome in many ways.
There is also a question in my mind about Kodak’s promotion and sales policies in general. I think these may have had a seriously deleterious effect on sales of all photographic especially with the increasing competition that began about the 1960s.
Perhaps Kodak or Fuji can come up with incorporated coupler color films that have better lifetimes. However, note that its the dark storage time which is so much longer for Kodachrome, its fading resistance under projection is
worse than incorporated coupler reversal films. I have no idea why.
July 2nd, 2009 19:51
I vote for holgraphic binary storage in plexiglas with a laser to read them following some very easy to program reading capability. But this can be substituted for any physical substance that records data for extremely long periods of time, even if that is india ink bar codes on silk parchment stored in an inert gas. The software to read the codes and translate them to RGB alpha and ASCII will also be included in several popular languages a la Rosetta Stone.
Of course, some editing will be required. But with collaboration, the work would at least be all original. Extremely important images and text would be preserved in duplicate copies.
Then again, how much of the 21st century, the first all-digital one, will be around for the 29th? the 99th? the 9999th? Certainly, some of it should survive for its anachronistic wonder.