Kodak Carousel ad 1962
. . . and good riddance.
As a footnote to my Kodachrome post, I should add that amidst all the outpouring of nostalgia for Kodachrome — which, I remind you, was a color-slide film — I have never ever heard anyone express fond memories of its necessary corollary for everyday use, the Kodak Carousel slide projector.
Prior to my engagement with the computer (which, for all its benefits, holds the frequency record as the technology at which I’ve screamed murderously), the most frustrating device required by my professional activity was the Kodak slide projector. Necessary in my line of work both for classroom teaching and for public lecturing, it haunted those situations with its ever-lurking unreliability: not just the occasional blown bulb and ensuing frantic hunt for a replacement, but the inevitable damaged slide tray or bent/stuck slide and resultant distracting unjamming procedure, the malfunction of the controller with its usually too-short cord, and other wonders. Not to mention the periodic inadvertent upside-down or reversed image due to careless slide insertion. It never dependably just worked, and Kodak never figured out how to make it foolproof. Or quiet. The company discontinued production of the final model (which, like some of its predecessors, featured autofocus and other updates) in 2004, so its production run lasted about 43 years.
Kodak Carousel 600 instruction manual
As if by magic, the slide projector seemed to bring out the archetypical Luddite in academics, even those who could operate radios, television sets, and cars with relative ease. It had the same effect on many photographers, presumably at ease with all kinds of devices. Despite the fact that the hand-held remote-control gizmo had a mere three buttons and barely changed its design in the thirty years I used it, unfailingly a scholarly lecturer or photographer would say “Now how does this thing work?” and then fumble with it, going forward instead of backward, decreasing instead of sharpening the focus, and otherwise messing with a mechanism that, while undependable, certainly wasn’t complex.
Kodak Carousel print ad, 1962
The classic instance of this projector-related incomprehension among academics came for me during a 1982 Rosalind Krauss lecture at the Society for Photographic Education National Conference in Colorado Springs. Krauss put one of Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” images on the screen early into her talk and left it there for a good twenty minutes while she divagated. Every user’s manual advises you not to leave a single slide on the screen for prolonged periods of time, but Krauss surely had never bothered to read the instructions for this technology she used regularly in her line of work. She has much more important things to do, as we all know, what with all that important theory urgently demanding to get generated.
Inevitably, the bulb generated heat in the small space between itself and the slide, warming the celluloid substrate that carries the image. The substrate swelled and buckled slightly, which popped the image out of focus. “Focus that,” Krauss would order. The conference-appointed intern serving as a tech for the lecture would jump up obediently and so so. Of course, a few minutes later it would happen again, and Krauss would repeat her command.
Finally, clearly frustrated, and evidently ignorant of basic thermodynamics, Krauss snapped, “This is a roomful of photographers! Doesn’t anyone know how to focus?” At which point the emulsion on the Sherman on the screen started to melt. A lovely moment.
Kodak 4400 Carousel Slide Projector
In any case, when I started using Microsoft Office I switched to PowerPoint for my slideshows, then moved to Apple’s Keynote. I’ve never missed the Carousel, nor looked back with an instant’s regret. No warm and fuzzy recollections here. Do I have company in my happy leave-taking? Does the slide projector have its advocates and defenders? If any reader wants to add to my deprecation, or to speak up for the slide projector (not just the Kodak variants, but some of the other species as well), or recount a memorable slide-projector experience, let ‘er rip.
Meanwhile, via YouTube, enjoy “Mad Men: The Carousel,” a scene from the 2007 season of the AMC series Mad Men (produced by Matthew Weiner) in which master Madison Avenue huckster Donald Draper uses a prototype of the then-new device to pitch Kodak on an ad campaign for its 1962 debut of the original Carousel, even giving it that name as part of the proposed campaign. You can also view an image-by-image version of his slideshow, captioned with the lines from his pitch.
Actually, I am nostalgic for the old Carousel projector. One of my first real jobs was to manage a rental division of an AV company. (Remember those?)
The company (Sarner Audio Visual in London) would produce 48-projector shows, which would then go on tour illustrating corporate product launches or annual meeting reviews, etc. Of course as soon as video projection came along that was the end of it.
But to hand-assemble 48 wheels of slides, ensuring every last one of them was in the right order and would fire at the right moment via the controller, was an art form in itself. 🙂
I don’t really miss them, they were I guess a nightmare in many ways – but there was a craft and art quality to those presentations that could be quite spectacular – the ease and slickness of digital imagery and projection loses something at times.
And btw it was almost always Ektachrome for professional AV for some reason, never Kodachrome.
All the best
Alan
(aka a Luddite at Heart)
You forgot to mention dust and lint. The machine’s built-in suction
added these tiny things to flawless photographs in the fraction of a
second. Nothing you can do, the engineers thought it’s supposed to be
like this.
You also forgot to mention that in the good old times of slide
projectors artists had to spend a considerable amount of their time
with photographing their own work again and again because all those
curators who might be interested in an artist’s work collected slides
in a hamster-like manner. (It’s always good to have some extra slides,
even if you are not interested in the work at all.)
Re the burning slide incident: In the early 70’s I did a west coast lecture tour starting in San Diego. There was a large crowd due to the building enthusiasm for photography. Never having spoken to so large a crowd, and still believing that I has something to say about the human condition and what not, I held the first slide on the screen while haranguing the assembled multitudes.
Suddenly someone shouted, “Change the slide . . . it’s about to burn.” Quick as wink I did so. I still have that slide somewhere and used to show it as an example of lack of concentration . . .
Keep up the good work.
Thank you for this informative article. After reading the first segment I felt an enormous sense of relief at what I though were my singular manifestations of anger toward the computer and my lack of skills in projecting slides! The serious technical information was made infinitely more easy to
absorb by the wit of your prose.
A couple of thoughts on the slide projector.
1. I remember when my daughter was about 6. I brought a slide projector home to test a lecture I was preparing. I set up the projector in the living room and ran through the slides. All was well.
I came out the back of the house to get my cup of tea and Clare walked up to the front room where, rightly or wrongly, I had left the machine running. I heard this cry of delight. Clare was watching the projected image – about 6 feet across – on the living room wall. She was entranced by its scale and beauty.
I had long lost any enthusiasm for the confounded things but her reaction reminded me just how beautiful a large, sharp and saturated (projected) image could be.
2. Digital slideshows have their place to be sure, but to this day I always try to get a seat near the lecturer so I can watch “the show” on the lecturer’s computer screen rather than suffer the over-enlarged, usually poorly saturated, often poorly color-balanced projected image.
If you ask me whether I would rather go back? Probably not. However, on occasions such as this, I always reflect on the fact that what we call “progress” is, more often than not, more aptly described as a process of systematic forgetting.
I remember attending a talk by Rosalind Krauss at a Picasso symposium in the early 1990s, and by then she most certainly did know how to operate a projector. The grad student who was running a two-projector show wasn’t managing it very well, and Prof. Krauss marched to the back of the auditorium to set things right.
When I’ve had to project a slide for a long period of time, I’ve usually made dupes to avoid overheating the slide, or more often, I’ll make close ups of details that I might want to discuss and dupes of the full image, so that I can switch among them.
Now if I have to give a talk at a conference or lecture with slides, I usually bring my images on a flash drive, because that’s what most places are set up for, and it’s certainly convenient not to have to travel with my own projector, but the quality of most of these digital projectors that are routinely available still isn’t as good as a 35mm slide projector, and neither comes vaguely close to medium-format projection.
Maybe Krauss got herself a tutorial somewhere along the line. Your multiple-copy solution to the problem of keeping an image on-screen for some length of time strikes me as very smart.
No disagreement here re the quality of a good slide vs. a digitized version of the same image, especially if we compare a Kodachrome original — an image whose first version was made on Kodachrome film — to a scanned version thereof. No contest. But I have to add two caveats. Most photographers whose slide shows I have attended over the years presented their imagery in the form of slides made from prints of their work, putting them at least one remove away from the originals. Moreover, most of the “art in the dark” photo-history/art-history slide lectures I’ve seen (and given) consisted of a mix including slides made directly from prints, as just mentioned, plus dupes of such slides, plus slides made from reproductions in books and magazines, plus dupes of such slides.
So the slide’s not the original work, in most cases; it’s a reference to the work. Most people recognize it as such. As a critic and teacher, I’ve always told my readers and students that they shouldn’t think they know any work until they’ve stood in its actual presence and experienced it in the flesh, so to speak. Projected formats (ink reproduction also) emulsify many characteristics of objects: scale, surface quality, tonal palette, dimensionality . . .
Be that as it may, most people today encounter far more work in the form of reproduction — on the printed page, in some projected form, on the computer screen — than they’ll ever encounter in person. I have a theory that the reason most postmodern work lacks any engaging physical affect has nothing to do with its makers’ conscious turning away from that aspect of craft and conception. It results from their growing up as artists looking at work in books and magazines and in slide shows, responding to what looked best in those formats, and then making work that would look good on the page or on the screen. In short, they make work intended to have its greatest effectiveness in reproduction.
I completely agree about reproductions of reproductions. Although most of my academic work focuses on literature, when I’m discussing visual works, I always remind students that they haven’t seen it until they’ve really seen it, and sometimes I’ll show multiple reproductions of the same work to reinforce that point.
It’s an interesting idea that postmodern work is often intended to have its greatest effectiveness in reproduction. Maybe that’s where to draw the line between the conceptualist modern and the conceptualist postmodern. I remember the first time I saw the actual Fur-Lined Teacup [by Meret Oppenheim] I was surprised by what a strange and defamiliarizing effect it had, even though I had seen many photographs of it. I’ve heard similar reports about Damien Hirst’s “Diamond Skull,” which I haven’t seen myself, so maybe its object/craft value works against its postmodern media-hype value.
Since you come from a literary background, as do I, I’ll propose that a slide version of any work of art is a translation. (Assuming that the original work is not a slide itself.) And that a dupe of a slide is a translation of a translation, and a slide made from a reproduction in a book is something akin to a translation of a translation of a translation.
As with the etched and engraved reproductions of artworks on which much of the discourse on art based itself prior to the advent of photography, when you look at slides or ink reproductions you’re dealing with what William M. Ivins defined as “reports” about the work, not the work itself. No report is neutral. It’s a description, not a transcription. All descriptions are necessarily partial.
This is where the the supposedly “discredited” concept of connoisseurship reasserts its enduring value. The comments of a person who knows Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” from having stood in its presence will have a level of credibility above and beyond the response of someone who has only seen it reproduced in a book, just as the analysis by a person who read Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls” in the original Russian will carry more weight than that of one who knows it only in translation.
A copy of a work of visual art is certainly a translation, but having done both photographic copy work and literary translation — as I suspect you may have done as well — copy work certainly doesn’t feel as creative as literary translation.
In copy work one usually strives for literalism, and if all the limitations of the process and the materials are overcome to produce a measurably accurate copy, it feels like success. That isn’t to say that there isn’t interpretation on some level — in deciding, for instance, how much surface texture to reveal in the copy — but largely it seems that the work is a stand-in for the Macbeth chart.
In literary translation, there is no measure of accuracy, and striving for literalism is sure to produce failure. Literary translation is something of a performance and something of an interpretation, and in the end every translation feels like a balance sheet of so many compromises. Of course there are compromises in photographic copy work, but the range of options seems more constrained.
If we restrict ourselves to photography, and to certain types of photography — documentary, photojournalism, press photography, fashion and magazine illustration — and assume good slide quality, then I’d agree that the loss of essential aspects could be minimal. You’d get the iconography, the formal structure, and much of the content in a well-made slide. With someone like Cartier-Bresson, for example, I don’t see much difference between encountering his work in original-print form, well-reproduced in ink on the page, or in a good slide (or even a competent digital scan).
With any photographer who prints interpretively, uses image scale in a deliberate way, or creates objects with distinctive physical characteristics, the transformation resulting from slide or scan proves substantial and can become enormous. Projecting a Lucas Samaras SX-70 distorts its scale and radically alters its impact. From even the best slide you’ll learn nothing about why Frederick Evans stopped printing when platinum paper became unavailable during World War I. Much of the physicality of Joel-Peter Witkin’s work disappears when presented on the page or in projection.
I don’t propose that the making of slides involves the complex and creative procedures involved in serious literary translation. It’s probably better analogized to Yahoo!’s Babel Fish. It will get some basic elements right if they’re clearly presented. Other components will get ignored, garbled, or changed beyond recognition. Useful for basic communication in simple, straightforward prose composed in short declarative sentences. Problematic for nuanced prose of any kind, including fiction, and lousy for poetry — unless you’re open to the dada effect (Chinglish does have its charms).