How would you use the last roll of Kodachrome? Renowned photographer Steve McCurry (below) clearly had something in mind last August when Kodak announced that it would no longer produce the slide film, the world’s first successful color film.
McCurry asked for the last roll, and spent nine months planning how he’d use the 36 exposures. In June, he left on a six-week trip to capture the images, trailed by a TV crew from the National Geographic Channel, which is making an hour-long documentary for the occasion. National Geographic may put some of the images in its magazine, too.
Said McCurry:
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.
In the United States, McCurry shot the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Terminal and Robert de Niro, who represents the filmmaking industry. Paul Simon, despite the song he wrote about the film, declined to participate.
McCurry then went to western India where he captured Bollywood stars and the Ribari tribespeople in Rajasthan, which is said to be disappearing (like the film).
The photographer knows his symbolism: he then traveled to Parsons, Kansas, “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,” says the Associated Press.
He also included himself in the picture, the AP says: “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.”
The slides will go, appropriately, to the George Eastman House in Rochester.
Here’s a link to the AP story.
Kodak and the Eastman House recently combined with the Chautauqua Institution on a Photo Week, and McCurry sat for an interview on his experiences in photography.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Associated Press