Kodak Kills Kodachrom

After being made for 74 years, Kodak announced today that Kodachrome will no longer be made.

From the press release:

ROCHESTER, N.Y., June 22 -- Eastman Kodak Company announced today that it will retire KODACHROME Color Film this year, concluding its 74-year run as a photography icon.

Sales of KODACHROME Film, which became the world’s first commercially successful color film in 1935, have declined dramatically in recent years as photographers turned to newer KODAK Films or to the digital imaging technologies that Kodak pioneered. Today, KODACHROME Film represents just a fraction of one percent of Kodak’s total sales of still-picture films.

“KODACHROME Film is an iconic product and a testament to Kodak’s long and continuing leadership in imaging technology,” said Mary Jane Hellyar, President of Kodak’s Film, Photofinishing and Entertainment Group. "It was certainly a difficult decision to retire it, given its rich history. However, the majority of today's photographers have voiced their preference to capture images with newer technology – both film and digital. Kodak remains committed to providing the highest-performing products – both film and digital – to meet those needs."

While Kodak now derives about 70% of its revenues from commercial and consumer digital businesses, it is the global leader in the film business. Kodak has continued to bring innovative new film products to market, including seven new professional still films and several new VISION2 and VISION3 motion picture films in the past three years.These new still film products are among those that have become the dominant choice for those professional and advanced amateur photographers who use KODAK Films.

Among the well-known professional photographers who used KODACHROME Film is Steve McCurry, whose picture of a young Afghan girl captured the hearts of millions of people around the world as she peered hauntingly from the cover of National Geographic Magazine in 1985.

As part of a tribute to KODACHROME Film, Kodak will donate the last rolls of the film to George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, which houses the world’s largest collection of cameras and related artifacts. McCurry will shoot one of those last rolls and the images will be donated to Eastman House.

“The early part of my career was dominated by KODACHROME Film, and I reached for that film to shoot some of my most memorable images,” said McCurry. “While KODACHROME Film was very good to me, I have since moved on to other films and digital to create my images. In fact, when I returned to shoot the ‘Afghan Girl’ 17 years later, I used KODAK PROFESSIONAL EKTACHROME Film E100VS to create that image, rather than KODACHROME Film as with the original.”

For all of its magic, KODACHROME is a complex film to manufacture and an even more complex film to process. There is only one remaining photofinishing lab in the world – Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas – that processes KODACHROME Film, precisely because of the difficulty of processing. This lack of widespread processing availability, as well as the features of newer films introduced by Kodak over the years, has accelerated the decline of demand for KODACHROME Film.

During its run, KODACHROME Film filled a special niche in the annals of the imaging world. It was used to capture some of the best-known photographs in history, while also being the film of choice for family slide shows of the Baby Boom generation.

To celebrate the film’s storied history, Kodak has created a gallery of iconic images, including the Afghan girl and other McCurry photos, as well as others from professional photographers Eric Meola and Peter Guttman on its website: www.kodak.com/go/kodachrometribute. Special podcasts featuring McCurry and Guttman will also be featured on the website.

Kodak estimates that current supplies of KODACHROME Film will last until early this fall at the current sales pace. Dwayne’s Photo has indicated it will continue to offer processing for the film through 2010. Current KODACHROME Film users are encouraged to try other KODAK Films, such as KODAK PROFESSIONAL EKTACHROME E100G and EKTAR 100 Film. These films both feature extremely fine grain. For more information, please visit www.kodak.com/go/professional.

Frame grabbing: The art of drawing great photography from video

By Edward J. Delaney

[The June issue of Esquire arrives on newsstands Sunday, and there's something unique about its cover photo. Not the presence of an attractive young starlet — that's de rigueur in the magazine business. It's that the photo of Megan Fox was shot with a video camera, not a still one. Photographer Greg Williams shot footage of Fox with one of those jaw-dropping Red One cameras and pulled stills from the resulting video. (As Zach noted recently, Esquire seems to be cornering the market on cover gimmicks: e-ink, mix-and-match flip books, and now framegrabbing.)

I thought that was a perfect reason to post this interview Ted did with Pulitzer-winning photographer (and my former coworker at The Dallas Morning News) David Leeson about frame grabbing — an area where he was an early innovator. —Josh]

To David Leeson, the appeal of frame grabbing seems obvious. It reduces the number of tools a photographer has to juggle, and it enables multiple outputs from the same journalistic workflow. As he wrote about his first experience, preparing to cover Hurricane Katrina in 2005:

"The first thing I did upon receiving an HDV camera…was shoot a few seconds of video, import it with iMovie and make a frame grab. The results were almost as magical as the first time I saw a print emerge in a tray of developer. I knew the world of photojournalism as we knew it, would never be quite the same again."

But he’s been surprised by the resistance among many of his fellow photojournalists. Even as each wave of new cameras to hit the market makes frame grabbing an easier option, Leeson still finds himself preaching to the unconverted. The main resistance may be the core belief that the fundamental art of the photograph is timing the decision of when to press the shutter...... more

The Digital Photo & Imaging Show Thursday 18th - Friday 19th June 2009

Thursday 18th - Friday 19th June 2009

Stand 601 is where you will find the LPA at this years DPI show, please drop by for a chat.
REMEMBER to register online now for your free entry to the DPI show (£12 on the door)

The DPI show has been designed to be the knowledge centre for professional photographers and agencies active in advertising, fashion, photojournalism, sports/action, portraiture, wedding and lifestyle photography.

The DPI show will feature the second year of the hugely successful BJP Insight series which will include seminars from many of the leading lights in the photographic market. It provides an opportunity where you can interact with people who have been influenced by photography and in many cases have influenced the world.

We will also have a Live studio run by the Pro Centre, building a full-feature facility at the show illustrating the capabilities of the equipment in a studio environment.

The DPI show will include industry leaders in the photographic market such as Hasselblad, Nikon, Adobe, Broncolor, Apple Solutions Experts, HP and many more...

NEW Speakers announced by The British Journal of Photography - The Insight Lecture Programme

LPA Photo Forum At Camden Arts Centre

The LPA has linked up with Camden Arts Centre to hold regular photography events and presentations from established and emerging photographers and other professionals linked to the photography industry.

The aim is to provide a platform to the (LPA) photography community to stimulate communication and networking in an informal setting. These evening sessions 6.30-8.30pm, are on selected Thursdays, each month, starting on the 7th May with presentations by photographers Suki Parnell and John Ferguson, discussing their current projects.

For more info or to book a seat, please contact Kevin O'Connor at the LPA

Tickets are £5.00 each and spaces are limited , so booking is essential!!!!

Photograpy by Sukey Parnell

The Arts Forum

The Brighton Media Centre invites you to ArtsfORUM.

A monthly ‘Review of Art in Progress’ for the photography and moving image enthusiasts.

The Arts Forum allows established and emerging photographers to film makers to articulate and showcase their current project to an audience, encouraging discussion and feedback in a peer-led environment.

Led by Vanessa Jones and Beatrice Haverich, it is held every second Wednesday of each month.

Join us for an evening of inspiration

The aim of this event is to serve as a communications network to benefit both the audience and the artist through the process of an open critique. A discussion of the presented bodies of work will provide a platform for the artist to speak about their aims and concerns of their projects.

Submission process please email around 10 images (small Jpgs.) of a body of work in progress to vanessa@mediacentre.org.
The selected artists will be notified 2 weeks before the event.

LIMITED SPACES SO BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL

INFO and BOOKINGS: 07882852659 or 07890834112
vanessa@mediacentre.org or info@beatricehaverich.com

We will have a Bar… before, during and after!

6.30pm-8.00pm
Wednesday 11 March 2009
Brighton Media Centre Gallery
Friese-Greene House
15-17 Middle Street
Brighton BN1 1AL

Fujifilm Launch Medium Format Film Camera

It cheered me up to see that Fujifilm are launching a new medium format film camera this spring. We are not sure when it will sell in the UK as yet.

First shown as a prototype at the Photokina trade show in Cologne last year, the GF670 Professional will now be released in Japan in mid-March as a portable folding bellows camera, jointly developed by Fujifilm and Cosina. The production may be limited to just 5000 units.

Its most unusual feature is a mechanism for switching between two different film formats - 6x7cm and 6x6cm. It is also fitted with an 80mm f/3.5 fixed focal length lens, which is composed of six glass elements in four groups. The GF670 has an automatic lens shutter, and an SPD sensor with both automatic and manual autofocus. The ISO sensitivity ranges from 25 to 3200.

Garbo Meets Models in N.Y. Show Pitching Fashion Photos as Art

Spot the Fake #1" by Miles Aldridge
Review by Linda Yablonsky

Feb. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Most men in suits don’t look like sex symbols. Gary Cooper did, at least in Edward Steichen’s come- hither 1930 photograph of the actor for Vogue.

In those days, a fashion magazine was the go-to place for seduction by portraiture, publishing the most provocative photographers, writers and designers of the moment.

Today, a style magazine is literally a museum piece at New York’s International Center of Photography. Proclaiming 2009 as its Year of Fashion, ICP is presenting four separate but unequal exhibitions that propose fashion photography as a crucible for new ideas in art.

To accomplish this, the ICP, which prides itself on classic photojournalism, has taken a radical step. Its lead show, “Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now,” pretty much dispenses with photographic prints. Those it does show are nearly lost within a blizzard of magazine layouts, and not even original ones at that. All are reproductions, most published within the past two years.

Fashion trades on fantasy and “Weird Beauty” includes some startling images. Several center on the mouth, exemplified by Miles Aldridge’s bright color close-up of a woman’s blinding white teeth clenching a yellow gemstone between her fiery red lips.

Languid Young Men

This picture is surrounded by Aldridge images from recent magazines, some featuring languid young men sleeping under bushes. Their clothing is secondary to their presentation as objects of desire themselves.

That is what is most striking about the images in this show: Clothes are not the center of attention. The artifice of the image itself is what takes center stage -- the dramatic lighting, framing, styling and posing that combine to brand the style of each of the show’s 40 photographers rather than any designer of fashion.

From Nick Knight we get an overhead, black-and-white shot of a model in a laced-string camisole laid out on an examination table as if begging to be ravished. Paolo Roversi’s “Blue Mask” surrounds the model’s face behind the blow-up of another Roversi photograph of her tinted blue face, with a fake pink mouth attached.

Removed from their commercial context, it might be easier to consider these images as ingenious works of art. But we see them here only in the service of commerce, to sell a label or a concept, not to create any larger understanding of the human condition.

Steichen, who mined the Romantic tradition of the sublime before becoming a hard-core modernist, was one of the stars of the Conde Nast firmament in the salad days of Vogue and Vanity Fair, from 1923 to 1937.

Socialites, Celebrities

His work for those magazines is the subject of a retrospective at the ICP, with 175 photographs of socialites and celebrities who ruled the gossip columns of the day.

It’s interesting to move from the abject surrealism of “Weird Beauty” to the pronounced glamour of Steichen, who established the photography department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. His formal iconography of famous figures like Winston Churchill, Amelia Earhart, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo and Cooper has influenced contemporary photographers as disparate as Robert Mapplethorpe and Irving Penn.

Two smaller shows force a closer consideration of the artistry behind a fashion photograph. “Munkacsi’s Lost Archive” presents a small selection of new prints from a cache of glass negatives by the Hungarian photographer, acquired by the ICP after they appeared on EBay.

Before he died in 1963, Martin Munkacsi was a top talent at Harper’s Bazaar whose art took place as much in his darkroom as on a set. The show reveals his process, juxtaposing original shots that include an assistant’s hands or feet in the frame with the tight focus of a cropped, finished print.

Stylish Satchel

More absorbing -- and curious -- is “This Is Not a Fashion Photograph,” a group of unrelated photographs from ICP’s collections that curator Vince Aletti cites as having as much calculated style as documentary truth.

It would be difficult to find a more fashionable image than George Strock’s 1941 photograph of the very stylish baseball great Satchel Paige, who lights a cigarette at a Harlem pool hall.

It has personality, it has social realism, it has class. Which means it may not matter if we label it art, journalism or fashion. At the ICP, such distinctions are completely without a difference.

“Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now,” “Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Conde Nast Years, 1923-1937,” “This is Not a Fashion Photograph: Selections from the ICP Collection” and “Munkacsi’s Lost Archive” are on view through May 3 at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of Americas at West 43rd St. Information: +1-212-857-0045; http://www.icp.org.

( Linda Yablonsky is an art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Linda Yablonsky in New York at fabyab@earthlink.net.

"Spot the Fake #1" by Miles Aldridge, a 2006 photograph published in New York Times T Magazine, is shown here. The photo will be on display as part of the exhibit "Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now" at New York's International Center of Photography through May 3, 2009. Photographer: Miles Aldridge/ICP via Bloomberg News