What The Eye Is Told To See.
I just watched “Kodachrome” with Ed Harris playing a hybrid of Steve McCurry and David Alan Harvey.
Kodachrome for a long time defined the way we saw the world. This was a world that was much the same as the one around us all, but the Kodachrome interpretation was not and we excepted the films version to define our view of far off places. It was not a lie, or if it was, we all paid into it willingly, but the reality of it is, by choosing your film, any film, we decided how the world would look at the end of the process.
Kodachromes magic was it dominated a time when the world was opening up to us all, where exotic places were becoming a known thing, a Kodachrome interpreted thing. From the 1950’s to the end of the century, national Geographic and other publications gave us a look into worlds only dreampt of.
A digital camera (Pen F) using a lens from the early period of Kodachrome (F mount half frame Olympus 25mm f2.8) giving me a slightly Kodachrome vide.
No choice is irrelevant in photography, art or any other creative pursuit. You pick your interpretive tool and you get the look you expect.
The demise of the K-14 Kodachrome process, or mainstream film for that matter did not mean the end of image capture, it just meant that what we were used to, what we had learned to expect, to love even, was gone.
This was already happening.
From the early 90’s I had drifted towards Fuji Velvia, because as lovely as the gentle warm tones deep reds and contrasting if slightly unnaturally cool tones of Kodachrome were, I required the more vibrant and accurate greens and blues of Velvia for landscape work, at the peril of pink skin tones.
A thoroughly modern shot with a slightly 70’s filmic look.
In the digital era we have lost the tactile reality of film. There is no patient, reliable and relatively timeless memory store hidden in a cupboard or under the bed*. Digital is an illusion unless you print from it, just unrealised bits, while film could be ignored for generations before it got its chance to be revealed.
*K-14 slides are rated at 100 years plus if well stored and well processed black and white prints about the same, but ironically, digital resources will be able to do something with them ongoing. Try opening a 100 year old digital file on an ancient storage system, when we get there.