Kodachrome, End of the Run: Photographs From the Final Batches
April 1–29; opening reception April 15, 5–7 p.m.
Sverdrup Building, Webster University
8300 Big Bend, 314-246-7673
On December 30, a group of Webster University students took a road trip to Parsons, Kansas. The destination was Dwayne’s Photo, the last lab in the world to process Kodachrome film. (Kodak ceased production of the film in June 2009.) “Most people are like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s really bright colors; Paul Simon wrote a song about it; they’re discontinuing it; people are making a big deal about it,’” says Webster photography professor Susan Stang, who organized the trip as part of “The Last Kodachrome Project,” an exhibit and book based around 110 rolls of film shot by 60 Webster students, whose rolls were the last to be processed at Dwayne’s. Kodachrome, says Stang, is so important to the history of photography, the first thing she writes on the blackboard each semester is “1935,” the year it was introduced by Kodak. It was the first viable, modern color film; its saturation and sharpness were unrivaled for years (National Geographic used nothing else), and it was the most archival. But as color film technology—and digital film technology—evolved, Kodachrome “lost its reason to be,” says Stang. When she came into a cache of 30-year-old Kodachrome film and offered it to her students to shoot with, they eagerly accepted (“I never thought I’d get to shoot a roll of Kodachrome in my life!”) One student, David Nash—whose photograph appears above—proposed the idea of asking Dwayne’s to hold their film, so that their rolls would be the last Kodachrome in the world to be processed. Stang thought it was a terrific idea, though she warned them that the older film might not process very well: “They said, ‘We don’t care.’ They just wanted to be a part of this great landmark in photographic history."
For a slideshow of images and more on the students’ trip to Kansas, go HERE.
