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What should a photographer shoot when
he's entrusted with the very last roll of Kodachrome?


      Steve McCurry took aim at the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central
Terminal and a few human icons, too. Paul Simon, the crooner
synonymous with the fabled film's richly saturated colors, shied
away. But Robert De Niro stood in for the world of filmmaking.


      Then McCurry headed from his base in New York City to southern
Asia, where in 1984 he shot a famous portrait of a green-eyed
Afghan refugee girl that made the cover of National Geographic. In
India, he snapped a tribe whose nomadic way of life is disappearing
- just as Kodachrome is.


      The world's first commercially successful color film, extolled
since the Great Depression for its sharpness, archival durability
and vibrant yet realistic hues, "makes you think," as Simon
sings, "all the world's a sunny day."


      Kodachrome enjoyed its mass-market heyday in the 1960s and '70s
before being eclipsed by video and easy-to-process color negative
films, the kind that prints are made from. It garnered its share of
spectacular images, none more iconic than Abraham Zapruder's reel
of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963.


      But Mama Time is taking Kodachrome away, and McCurry feels the
tug of nostalgia even as he loads Eastman Kodak Co.'s last
manufactured roll into his Nikon F6, just as he's done "so many
tens of thousands of times."


      From that moment on, "there's a certain amount of observation
and walking around - exploring, hunting, moving," McCurry said of
his craft. "It's not all about taking pictures. It's about
appreciating this world we live in for such a brief amount of time.


      "I thought, what better way to kind of honor the memory of the
film than to try and photograph iconic places and people? It's in
(my) DNA to want to tell stories where the action is, that shed
light on the human condition."


      Betting its future on digital photography, Kodak discontinued
the slide and motion-picture film with a production run last August
in which a master sheet nearly a mile long was cut up into more
than 20,000 rolls.


      McCurry requested the final 36-exposure strip. After nine months
of planning, he embarked in June on a six-week odyssey. Trailing
him was a TV crew from National Geographic Channel, which plans to
broadcast a one-hour documentary early next year.


      National Geographic magazine is considering doing a spread on
McCurry's trip that would include a handful of images. All the
originals are destined for air-conditioned safekeeping at the
George Eastman House film and photography museum in Rochester.


      McCurry relied on a digital camera to help evaluate composition,
perspective and light, but choosing the moment to press the shutter
was pressure-packed. Even seasoned photographers have a hard time
knowing when "you're going to get that one emotional component to
the picture," McCurry said.


      His nerves were jangled again when he had to run the loaded
camera through airport X-ray machines in Italy and Turkey. One
security guard joked, "'Oh, take a picture,' which was kind of
funny because we were trying to make every frame count."


      McCurry returned to old haunts in western India where "color is
important culturally," drawing on Kodachrome's magical power to
subtly render contrast and color harmony in depictions of Ribari
tribespeople in Rajasthan and Bollywood luminaries in Mumbai.


      His journey ended in July in small-town Parsons, Kan., the home
of Dwayne's Photo, the last photo lab in the world that processes
the elaborately crafted color-reversal film. Dwayne's will close
that part of its business in December.

      "It's not a process like black-and-white that hobbyists could
do in their own dark room," co-owner Grant Steinle said, warning
Kodachrome hoarders "they really need to get out and shoot those
pictures" and perhaps shift over to newer lines of slide film like
Ektachrome and Fujichrome.


      In McCurry's roll, one or two exposures were a little off, but
he was pleased with the results. In one self-portrait, he posed
next to a Kodak-yellow taxicab bearing the license plate PKR 36 -
the code name for Professional Kodachrome film; in another, he's
sprawled on a hotel bed at journey's end.


      McCurry has a personal archive of 800,000 Kodachrome images he
takes good care of. But in late July, he chanced upon a batch of
1969 and 1972 Kodachromes he'd put in storage in Philadelphia long
ago and forgotten about. The discovery got him reminiscing about
his days as a hungry photographer hopping from Amsterdam to Africa
to Soviet-era Bulgaria.


      "Not only was the color really good, but they were actually not
bad pictures," McCurry marveled.

      "Imagine leaving digital images in a hard drive and coming back
40 years later. Would anybody be able to read that data? That's the
great thing about film. It's a self-contained object. You hold the
picture up to the light and there it is."
      

Gallery

Kodak retiring Kodachrome film

Arts and Culture

Photographer Steve McCurry, who shot an iconic portrait of an Afghan girl, recently traveled around the world to shoot the last roll of Kodachrome film ever manufactured.

Brooklyn, India on last Kodachrome roll

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