Kodak Moments
Eugene Smith 1957 Kodachrome
This morning I was sad to see the headline stating Kodak is filing for bankruptcy. After stopping production of Kodachrome film in 2009, Kodak now face another critical point in the company’s rich history.
I found a couple of videos online over the past week depicting several aspects of Kodak’s identity. The first is a short documentary made in 2010 about the last lab that processed Kodachrome film (found via PetaPixel). You can find a slideshow of Kodachrome photographs here. You can also find a tribute to Kodachrome film here on Kodak’s blog.
The second video link is a documentary made in 1958 about the process of making Kodak film (found via Open Culture). The documentary is in Dutch with English subtitles.
I can’t help but think of Tacita Dean’s current show in the Tate Modern, which unfortunately I won’t get to visit. Her 11-minute silent film is a tribute to the analog process and is made even more poignant by the current developments surrounding the demise of Kodak’s analog production.
And of course I can’t mention Tacita Dean without including her 2006 film Kodak. As described on ubuweb, ‘The 44-minute-long work Kodak constitutes a meditative elegy for the approaching demise of a medium specific to Dean’s own practice’. You can watch the film here.
Reblogged this on Camera Works and commented:
Will be interesting to see what happens in the coming years with film.