Kodachrome

The New Yorker

Although commercial color film was first produced in 1907, it was not widely used until the mid-nineteen-fifties, so when we think of people and events from the first half of the twentieth century we tend to imagine them in black-and-white. In fact, from the mid-thirties Kodak's Kodachrome process offered a remarkably colorfast and permanent image. The stunning pictures in this book show subjects familiar from black-and-white photography -- Georgia sharecroppers, New York City traffic beneath the Third Avenue El, Hugo Jaeger's Nazi Berlin -- but invigorated by a vivid palette that makes them feel startlingly contemporary. Unfortunately, Kodak, worried about losing business for its other, less stable color stocks, never made Kodachrome's superior durability a public selling point, and so the corpus of surviving color images is smaller than it might have been.