In a Digital World, Camera Film Fades to Black

Mama has taken your Kodachrome away but you can still find, and have fun with, a roll here and there

23 September 2010

This was Robert Cohen's Kodachrome shot of the audience at the state fair tractor pull. Pretty good for 14-year-old film.

Robert Cohen knows a thing or two about photography. He's a staff photographer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of America's most respected newspapers.

One day this past August, he set off to shoot photos at the Missouri State Fair in Sedalia. Fairs abound with wonderful photo opportunities: people eating corn dogs, riding the Ferris wheel, trying to win plush animals at the shooting gallery. Clowns applying face paint. Young lovers holding hands.

From this Cohen fair shot, you get the idea what he means about the vivid nature of real film as opposed to what some believe are flatter digital images.

Cohen caught them all, not on his fine digital camera, but on a well-worn 35-millimeter model, using vintage 1996 Kodachrome 200 film. He had found a roll by surprise in a freezer.

As he wrote in the Post-Dispatch, Kodachrome was once America's film of choice. It produced, as he put it, pictures so real, so full of texture. The color, rich and grainy, gave the film a soul that no smart phone app can match.

The final little box of Kodachrome rolled off the Eastman-Kodak company's assembly line in 2009. To most Americans, film was already a technical dinosaur, alongside typewriters and Beta video recorders.