We get the phrase “seeing the handwriting on the wall” from the Biblical story of the cyrptic message written by a disembodied hand on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, whereat said ghostly extremity inscribed the words “Mene Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.” (Old Testament, Book of Daniel 5: 1-6, 25-8.)
Rembrandt, "Belshazzar's Feast," about 1635
The Columbia Encyclopedia (sixth edition, 2008) tells us that “These Aramaic words may be translated literally as ‘It has been counted and counted, weighed and divided.’ Daniel interpreted this to mean that the king’s deeds had been weighed and found deficient and that his kingdom would therefore be divided.” (Here’s Rembrandt’s version of the scene.)
I don’t claim any prophetic ability. I don’t even lay much stock in my intuitive capacity, believing, as my late colleague Richard Kirstel often said, that “Intuition is like magic: it works, but the quality control sucks.” I don’t have special access to photo-industry insiders, and while I keep an ear to the ground on general principles I don’t listen especially closely to that industry’s mavens.
At the same time, I try my best to keep up with whatever news affects me as a member of our lens culture, I attend some of the trade expos, I talk with and listen closely to photographers, I observe at first hand what goes on in photo-education programs around the world, and I make a point of reading the handwriting on the walls. So, when Eastman Kodak announced on June 22 that it had ceased production of Kodachrome film after 74 years, I didn’t consider that at all surprising. Indeed, I found myself in the odd position of thinking “I told you so.”
Kodachrome roll film
The backstory: In 2000 the programming committee for World Press Photo invited me to deliver the keynote to that year’s WPP Award Days in Amsterdam, where the WPP Foundation was started in 1955. This is an annual celebration of photojournalism and press photography. While not deeply immersed in the world of photojournalism and press photography per se, I write about it regularly, so I’d demonstrated that I have something to say on these subjects. The committee that invited me included Robert Pledge of Contact Press Images and Grazia Neri of the eponymous Italian picture agency and gallery, so I assumed they wanted a provocation, and set out to create one. Here’s the full, previously unpublished text of my talk: “2020 Vision: Photojournalism’s Next Two Decades.” (I’m also uploading the text of my 1978 keynote address to the Society for Photographic Education, “No Future For You? Speculations on the Next Decade in Photography Education,” a provocation aimed at a much different audience. A number of my predictions therein anticipate the situation in which the medium of photography found itself in Y2K.)
For the Amsterdam event I created a fiction involving a 22-year-old recent graduate of a “time-based arts” MFA program, embarking on a career as a professional photojournalist. In describing this newbie’s entry-level skill set, assumptions, projects, and plans I drew on nothing more than what I’d observed as a teacher and visiting lecturer in such programs, what I’d learned from conversations with photographers and picture editors in the field, and what I’d read in publications readily available to the general public. No privy information, in other words, no advance notice from highly-placed inside sources. Elementary extrapolation. As Bob Dylan sings, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
The talk was well-received, on the whole. To my surprise and delight, the young award-winning photographer who got up to speak immediately after I finished, and whose name I’ve regretfully forgotten, began his talk by saying “I’m the photographer A. D. Coleman just described,” and proceeded to demonstrate that in detail.
However, since Eastman Kodak serves as WPP’s main sponsor, the hall was full of mid- and upper-level Kodak management types, most of them middle-aged — think of them as Kodak’s expensively suited, paunchy, graying executive goodfellas. Afterward, I heard from colleagues seated among them that they grumped and grumbled throughout my talk, whose projections they found ridiculous. Clueless, the lot of them, as subsequent events proved:
- Eighteen months later, in fall 2002, in Köln, Germany, at PhotoKina, the annual photo-industry extravaganza, Kodak demonstrated its new drugstore digital-print kisosks and announced it was taking the plunge into the digital realm.
- In May 2003, Kodak announced it would discontinue production of b&w paper.
- In 2008, Rochester Institute of Technology — the world’s preeminent photo-specific polytechnic institute, headquartered in Kodak’s home town and deeply subsidized by Big Yellow — announced that thenceforth it would teach gelatin-silver printing as an “alternative process.”
Kodachrome Super-8 film
And now, in June 2009, Kodak drops Kodachrome. of course this is news, appropriately treated as such. But it demands analysis as part of a larger pattern. The image environment inexorably turns toward digital forms. As that progresses, the consumer base for analog/chemical/”wet” photographic tools, materials, and processes diminishes — as does demand for instruction in using such technologies.
These turn into niche markets that enterprising boutique/microbrew producers will target and to which they will supply product lines specifically tailored to the demands of those specialized consumers. We’ve already seen this happen with pinhole cameras, Holgas, and the materials necessary for an assortment of “alternative processes” — even some gelatin-silver papers with high silver content.
This doesn’t mean that every current or past product will have its boutique equivalent. Economies of scale and/or proprietary formulae may mean that we’ll never again have SX-70 film or Kodachrome. It does mean that, if and when such issues get resolved in relation to a particular type of product, a new version may come on the market — probably more expensive than the original mass-produced predecessor, but with more consumer input into its qualities.
It’s always saddening when something slips out of the toolkit of a medium. It’s one less flavor at the disposal of the artist or communicator, one less taste for the audience to savor. Photographers such as Alex Webb have predicated their work on Kodachrome’s distinctive palette, and speak poignantly about what they feel it contributes to their work and how they respond to its imminent disappearance. There’s even a website, Dan Bayer’s The Kodachrome Project, dedicated to commemorating it (ironically, in a purely digital medium). Here’s my own tribute to this version of color photography, “Mama, Don’t Take Our Kodachrome Away,” a book introduction from 2002.
Photography and, more broadly, the lens-based media (including film and video) prove particularly prone to such losses, because — unlike sculpture, painting, etching, engraving, and other visual forms — so many of its tools, materials, and processes originate as mass-market consumer goods, their production and price dependent on large-scale distribution.
So we’ll see more of this, not less, as the image world turns digital. I won’t bother to say “I told you so” again. Just stick stick your own wet finger up in the breeze.
— A. D. Coleman
SPJ Research Award 2014
BigYellowDaddy Takes Our Kodachrome Away
We get the phrase “seeing the handwriting on the wall” from the Biblical story of the cyrptic message written by a disembodied hand on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, whereat said ghostly extremity inscribed the words “Mene Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.” (Old Testament, Book of Daniel 5: 1-6, 25-8.)
Rembrandt, "Belshazzar's Feast," about 1635
The Columbia Encyclopedia (sixth edition, 2008) tells us that “These Aramaic words may be translated literally as ‘It has been counted and counted, weighed and divided.’ Daniel interpreted this to mean that the king’s deeds had been weighed and found deficient and that his kingdom would therefore be divided.” (Here’s Rembrandt’s version of the scene.)
I don’t claim any prophetic ability. I don’t even lay much stock in my intuitive capacity, believing, as my late colleague Richard Kirstel often said, that “Intuition is like magic: it works, but the quality control sucks.” I don’t have special access to photo-industry insiders, and while I keep an ear to the ground on general principles I don’t listen especially closely to that industry’s mavens.
At the same time, I try my best to keep up with whatever news affects me as a member of our lens culture, I attend some of the trade expos, I talk with and listen closely to photographers, I observe at first hand what goes on in photo-education programs around the world, and I make a point of reading the handwriting on the walls. So, when Eastman Kodak announced on June 22 that it had ceased production of Kodachrome film after 74 years, I didn’t consider that at all surprising. Indeed, I found myself in the odd position of thinking “I told you so.”
Kodachrome roll film
The backstory: In 2000 the programming committee for World Press Photo invited me to deliver the keynote to that year’s WPP Award Days in Amsterdam, where the WPP Foundation was started in 1955. This is an annual celebration of photojournalism and press photography. While not deeply immersed in the world of photojournalism and press photography per se, I write about it regularly, so I’d demonstrated that I have something to say on these subjects. The committee that invited me included Robert Pledge of Contact Press Images and Grazia Neri of the eponymous Italian picture agency and gallery, so I assumed they wanted a provocation, and set out to create one. Here’s the full, previously unpublished text of my talk: “2020 Vision: Photojournalism’s Next Two Decades.” (I’m also uploading the text of my 1978 keynote address to the Society for Photographic Education, “No Future For You? Speculations on the Next Decade in Photography Education,” a provocation aimed at a much different audience. A number of my predictions therein anticipate the situation in which the medium of photography found itself in Y2K.)
For the Amsterdam event I created a fiction involving a 22-year-old recent graduate of a “time-based arts” MFA program, embarking on a career as a professional photojournalist. In describing this newbie’s entry-level skill set, assumptions, projects, and plans I drew on nothing more than what I’d observed as a teacher and visiting lecturer in such programs, what I’d learned from conversations with photographers and picture editors in the field, and what I’d read in publications readily available to the general public. No privy information, in other words, no advance notice from highly-placed inside sources. Elementary extrapolation. As Bob Dylan sings, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
The talk was well-received, on the whole. To my surprise and delight, the young award-winning photographer who got up to speak immediately after I finished, and whose name I’ve regretfully forgotten, began his talk by saying “I’m the photographer A. D. Coleman just described,” and proceeded to demonstrate that in detail.
However, since Eastman Kodak serves as WPP’s main sponsor, the hall was full of mid- and upper-level Kodak management types, most of them middle-aged — think of them as Kodak’s expensively suited, paunchy, graying executive goodfellas. Afterward, I heard from colleagues seated among them that they grumped and grumbled throughout my talk, whose projections they found ridiculous. Clueless, the lot of them, as subsequent events proved:
Kodachrome Super-8 film
And now, in June 2009, Kodak drops Kodachrome. of course this is news, appropriately treated as such. But it demands analysis as part of a larger pattern. The image environment inexorably turns toward digital forms. As that progresses, the consumer base for analog/chemical/”wet” photographic tools, materials, and processes diminishes — as does demand for instruction in using such technologies.
These turn into niche markets that enterprising boutique/microbrew producers will target and to which they will supply product lines specifically tailored to the demands of those specialized consumers. We’ve already seen this happen with pinhole cameras, Holgas, and the materials necessary for an assortment of “alternative processes” — even some gelatin-silver papers with high silver content.
This doesn’t mean that every current or past product will have its boutique equivalent. Economies of scale and/or proprietary formulae may mean that we’ll never again have SX-70 film or Kodachrome. It does mean that, if and when such issues get resolved in relation to a particular type of product, a new version may come on the market — probably more expensive than the original mass-produced predecessor, but with more consumer input into its qualities.
It’s always saddening when something slips out of the toolkit of a medium. It’s one less flavor at the disposal of the artist or communicator, one less taste for the audience to savor. Photographers such as Alex Webb have predicated their work on Kodachrome’s distinctive palette, and speak poignantly about what they feel it contributes to their work and how they respond to its imminent disappearance. There’s even a website, Dan Bayer’s The Kodachrome Project, dedicated to commemorating it (ironically, in a purely digital medium). Here’s my own tribute to this version of color photography, “Mama, Don’t Take Our Kodachrome Away,” a book introduction from 2002.
Photography and, more broadly, the lens-based media (including film and video) prove particularly prone to such losses, because — unlike sculpture, painting, etching, engraving, and other visual forms — so many of its tools, materials, and processes originate as mass-market consumer goods, their production and price dependent on large-scale distribution.
So we’ll see more of this, not less, as the image world turns digital. I won’t bother to say “I told you so” again. Just stick stick your own wet finger up in the breeze.
— A. D. Coleman