Kodachrome transparency, 1940
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This image of cows in a pasture was taken in Southern California in 1940 by Dick Whittington for his client, the Adohr & Brandt Dairy Company.
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2020-11-21T19:13:49-08:00
This image of cows in a pasture was taken in Southern California in 1940 by Dick Whittington for his client, the Adohr & Brandt Dairy Company. This is a Kodachrome image, one of the first commercially successful methods of color photography. Whereas there were colored photographs from the very beginning of the history of photography—such as the highly accessible and user friendly cyanotype, whose monochrome blue color comes from the iron involved in the sensitizing process—reproducing the full spectrum of color was a technical challenge. Kodak’s Kodachrome dry, color film is a polyester layer beneath three gelatinous layers of cyan, magenta, and yellow dye, which also include silver. When the film is developed, the dyes are released and color the image exposed to light in the camera. When Kodak first came out with dry, color film around the time this photograph was taken, Kodachrome was very expensive and color photography in general was not taken very seriously by the public. Color, as a new technological change in photography’s long black-and-white history, was at first only accepted for fashion and entertainment—nothing serious. Color photography required a massive industry to produce, and when it was used in journalism, it initially took six weeks to print color photographs in newspapers and magazines. But when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, the process sped up to a remarkable ten days to print color images in LIFE magazine. As color photography won the hearts of society and dominated photography, Kodachrome came along with it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Kodachrome began to appeal to the public and Kodak dominated the consumer market with its color film. Seen from our current perspective, we could say that Kodachrome represents the end of the analog era in the history of photography, as technology changes drastically, once again, with our advance into the digital era.
