Why Kodachrome faded out

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Famous for his photo of a young Afghan girl with stunning green eyes, Steve McCurry has since moved past the Kodachrome film he used to capture the image that graced the cover of National Geographic magazine in 1985.

But in a phone interview from Singapore, where he was on assignment, McCurry said ‘there wasn’t a better form produced on the planet at the time that was better than Kodachrome.”

In addition to its ‘fresh, wonderful color rendition,’ the film was fantastic for archiving purposes, he said.

‘There’s a longevity to that film which was really unrivaled,’ he said ‘I have an archive of 800,000 Kodachrome transparencies which I use on a daily basis in terms of scanning and editing and that sort of thing.”

Declining sales made the film a relic of the past, he said, and Eastman Kodak Co. announced today that it was discontinuing the film after 74 years.

McCurry is nostalgic about the 30 years he used Kodachrome.

“I kind of think of it as an old form now, like somebody you’re never going to see again,’ he said. ‘It was a beautiful, wonderful film and I had great success photographing with it. ... But the numbers, the economics just aren’t there. It’s just not viable. It’s a very costly process.”

Like most professional photographers, McCurry has moved on to digital cameras.

‘There’s a sense that there are things you can do with digital, a capability that you simply can’t do with film,’ he said. ‘There’s much wider range: You can shoot in very, very low light and you can stop action.”

-- Tiffany Hsu