Wallace Koopmans Artlog

I received my final set of slides back yesterday from Dwayne’s Photo which was the last place on earth still processing Kodachrome.  A part of me  feels a mournful nostalgia despite the fact that in actuality I had stopped using Kodachrome in any meaningful way years ago.   An incredible amount of history was recorded with this film and we can be grateful because it was the most stable early colour film and many 60 year old slides remain unchanged.

This is my homage to Kodachrome, which has been discontinued after 74 years.  My dad made thousands of beautiful slides with his Pentax H2 and a hand held light meter.  Kodachrome was his film of choice and today 50 years later these images still retain wonderful accurate colours.  Slides have an undeserved reputation perhaps developed from forced viewings of poorly made images.  On the other hand I have very fond memories of sitting as a family watching our lives displayed in giant images while the projectors fan hummed away broken by the distinctive sound of the next slide and the outburst of us children clamoring to be the first to identify the time and place.  I too made thousands of Kodachrome slides throughout my teens and twenties only reducing my usage when processing was no longer included in Canada.  Now we view our digital pictures and scanned slides on an HD TV and get that same social family interaction.  I do miss the hum of the projector though.

The painting is of a roll of K-11 process film with an ASA of 12.  The box is stamped process before DEC 1959 X and the cloth bag was provided for mailing back to Kodak for processing.  It sits in a deserved place of honour with my camera collection.