PARSONS, Kan. — An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to
Dwayne’s Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence
become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful color
film and still the most beloved.
That celebrated 75-year run from mainstream to niche photography is scheduled to
come to an end on Thursday when the last processing machine is shut down here to
be sold for scrap.
In the last weeks, dozens of visitors and thousands of overnight packages have
raced here, transforming this small prairie-bound city not far from the Oklahoma
border for a brief time into a center of nostalgia for the days when photographs
appeared not in the sterile frame of a computer screen or in a pack of flimsy
prints from the local drugstore but in the warm glow of a projector pulling an
image from a carousel of vivid slides.
In the span of minutes this week, two such visitors arrived. The first was a
railroad worker who had driven from Arkansas to pick up 1,580 rolls of film that
he had just paid $15,798 to develop. The second was an artist who had driven
directly here after flying from London to Wichita, Kan., on her first trip to
the United States to turn in three rolls of film and shoot five more before the
processing deadline.
The artist, Aliceson Carter, 42, was incredulous as she watched the railroad
worker, Jim DeNike, 53, loading a dozen boxes that contained nearly 50,000
slides into his old maroon Pontiac. He explained that every picture inside was
of railroad trains and that he had borrowed money from his father’s retirement
account to pay for developing them.
“That’s crazy to me,” Ms. Carter said. Then she snapped a picture of Mr. DeNike
on one of her last rolls.
Demanding both to shoot and process, Kodachrome rewarded generations of skilled
users with a richness of color and a unique treatment of light that many
photographers described as incomparable even as they shifted to digital cameras.
“Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day,” Paul Simon sang in his 1973 hit
“Kodachrome,” which carried the plea “Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.”
As news media around the world have heralded Thursday’s end of an era, rolls of
the discontinued film that had been hoarded in freezers and tucked away in
closets, sometimes for decades, have flooded Dwayne’s Photo, arriving from six
continents.
“It’s more than a film, it’s a pop culture icon,” said Todd Gustavson, a curator
from the George Eastman House, a photography museum in Rochester in the former
residence of the Kodak founder. “If you were in the postwar baby boom, it was
the color film, no doubt about it.”
Among the recent visitors was Steve McCurry, a photographer whose work has
appeared for decades in National Geographic including his well-known cover
portrait, shot in Kodachrome, of a Afghan girl that highlights what he describes
as the “sublime quality” of the film. When Kodak stopped producing the film last
year, the company gave him the last roll, which he hand-delivered to Parsons. “I
wasn’t going to take any chances,” he explained.
At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome, but
the last Kodak-run facility in the United States closed several years ago, then
the one in Japan and then the one in Switzerland. Since then, all that was left
has been Dwayne’s Photo. Last year, Kodak stopped producing the chemicals needed
to develop the film, providing the business with enough to continue processing
through the end of 2010. And last week, right on schedule, the lab opened up the
last canister of blue dye.
Kodak declined to comment for this article.
The status of lone survivor is a point of pride for Dwayne Steinle, who
remembers being warned more than once by a Kodak representative after he opened
the business more than a half-century ago that the area was too sparsely
populated for the studio to succeed. It has survived in part because Mr. Steinle
and his son Grant focused on lower-volume specialties — like black-and-white and
print-to-print developing, and, in the early ’90s, the processing of Kodachrome.
Still, the toll of the widespread switch to digital photography has been painful
for Dwayne’s, much as it has for Kodak. In the last decade, the number of
employees has been cut to about 60 from 200 and digital sales now account for
nearly half of revenue. Most of the staff and even the owners acknowledge that
they primarily use digital cameras. “That’s what we see as the future of the
business,” said Grant Steinle, who runs the business now.
The passing of Kodachrome has been much noted, from the CBS News program ”Sunday
Morning” to The Irish Times, but it is noteworthy in no small part for how long
it survived. Created in 1935, Kodachrome was an instant hit as the first film to
effectively render color.
Even when it stopped being the default film for chronicling everyday life —
thanks in part to the move to prints from slides — it continued to be the film
of choice for many hobbyists and medical professionals. Dr. Bharat Nathwani, 65,
a Los Angeles pathologist, lamented that he still had 400 unused rolls. “I might
hold it, God willing that Kodak sees its lack of wisdom.”
This week, the employees at Dwayne’s worked at a frenetic pace, keeping a
processing machine that has typically operated just a few hours a day working
around the clock (one of the many notes on the lab wall reads: “I took this to a
drugstore and they didn’t even know what it was”).
“We really didn’t expect it to be this crazy,” said Lanie George, who manages
the Kodachrome processing department.
One of the toughest decisions was how to deal with the dozens of requests from
amateurs and professionals alike to provide the last roll to be processed.
In the end, it was determined that a roll belonging to Dwayne Steinle, the
owner, would be last. It took three tries to find a camera that worked. And over
the course of the week he fired off shots of his house, his family and downtown
Parsons. The last frame is already planned for Thursday, a picture of all the
employees standing in front of Dwayne’s wearing shirts with the epitaph: “The
best slide and movie film in history is now officially retired. Kodachrome:
1935-2010.”
