Kodachrome, the film behind Afghan Girl, was perfected by two concert musicians
The colour film that shot Steve McCurry's 1984 Afghan Girl portrait began with two schoolboys who thought a 1917 colour movie looked awful. Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky Jr., both trained musicians and scientists, went on to invent a film Kodak manufactured for 74 years before stopping in 2009.
Early colour photography relied on additive methods such as Autochrome and Dufaycolor. These used a screen of tiny coloured elements that showed up when enlarged, and the finished slides swallowed 70 to 80 percent of the light when projected, demanding very bright lamps. Subtractive colour, which builds the image from dyes, avoided both problems. Rudolf Fischer patented a three-emulsion approach in 1913 but never made it work.
Confusingly, the name Kodachrome was first used for a different product. In 1913 John Capstaff at Kodak devised a two-colour subtractive process using a pair of glass negatives, one dyed red-orange and one blue-green, then sandwiched together. It went on sale in 1915 and handled skin tones well for its day. His 1922 test footage entered the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2012, though the process itself is largely forgotten.
The famous version came from Mannes and Godowsky, who first experimented after watching Our Navy as teenagers in 1917 and kept tinkering through college, building a two-lens camera whose projector proved hard to align. By the early 1930s they had produced a new film, which Kodak launched in 1935. It became the first mass-market colour film to use subtractive colour and served cinema and still cameras in formats from 8mm to large format. Walton Sound and Film Services chose it for the official 16mm film of Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953, valuing its accurate colour and long life in dark storage.
Its chemistry was so demanding that Kodak originally included processing in the price, and customers mailed rolls back to the company. In 1954 the U.S. Department of Justice ruled this uncompetitive, and a consent decree forced Kodak to sell the film without processing and license its methods to independent labs, though the bundled model persisted abroad. Rival films and then digital cameras eroded demand. Processing ended in December 2010, and a 2017 hint at revival was later judged unlikely.
Source: Kodachrome
