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Few achievements in the history of photography have been as consequential as the introduction of successful color processes, which fulfilled an aspiration dating from the earliest days of photographic experimentation. A leading milestone along that road was Eastman Kodak’s release of Kodachrome in 1935, initially as a 16 mm motion picture stock intended for amateur use. Other sizes soon followed: 8 mm movie film, 35 mm slide film, and 828 roll-film in 1936, then large-format sheet film in various cut sizes in 1938. The latter was called Kodachrome Professional, and it was offered in sizes ranging from 2×3 inches up to 11×14 inches. The central role of Kodachrome sheet film in encouraging extensive commercial use of color photographs in print media is the subject of this essay. As Kodak later asserted—with only modest exaggeration—Kodachrome “virtually revolutionized” the graphic arts industry.1
Color is obviously a complex visual phenomenon, and it has been examined from many different vantage points, from physics and neuroscience to evolutionary biology, aesthetics, and marketing theory. This essay, by contrast, examines Kodachrome sheet film from a more limited perspective: as a specific technology of color reproduction that played a key part in the history of American commercial and advertising photography. An underlying assumption is that color preferences themselves have histories: they change over time, often in response to changes in public taste, products, and cultural authority. (The initial hostility that greeted the bright color palette of Impressionism is a case in point.2) As a result, the role of Kodachrome sheet film will be viewed here primarily within three interwoven and co-evolving contexts: the growing use of color photographs in print; the role of competing methods of color photography; and the broader societal changes linked with rising consumerism and professional advertising.
Eastman Kodak began experimenting with color as early as 1904, in response to work carried out in France by the Lumière brothers on the Auto-chrome process.3 Unlike the Autochrome process and others that required color screens for taking and viewing color photographs, and unlike color images assembled layer by layer from individual black-and-white color-separation negatives, Kodachrome was an integral tri-pack, with separate emulsion layers on the same film base to record the levels of the three primary colors....