Life in Kodak

or the colour of aspiration 

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes about the significance of oil painting and its relation to wealth and aspiration, which is largely based on the technical qualities of the medium, allowing it to depict fine detail and texture in an almost hyperrealistic fashion. Both aristocrats and the rising bourgeoisie commissioned oil paintings to represent their wealth and as a means of appropriation, either of beautiful women or beautiful and expensive objects. Oil paintings – which in themselves were not cheap objects – brought these things into the stately parlors and palaces of the wealthy, to be admired by their visitors and guests. In a way, the paintings’ owners demonstrated their possession and mastery of all the things depicted which looked so realistic and present that one could almost reach out and touch them. Thereby he could reassure himself of his status, but also impress others. A bathing beauty was his and theirs to feast their eyes on at their leisure. The paintings’ longevity assured his status beyond death, and in their depiction of death – the skull, for example –, even his mastery of it. Yet, the painting’s origin as a work of artifice was never doubted.

Photography, by contrast, is endowed with a different quality. Because it records traces of light left by the actual world around us – notwithstanding recurring attempts to push this limitation to and beyond its boundaries, this remains the quality, which is associated with photography in the minds of most people – photography records traces of “real” life, which become the traces of a past irrevocably left behind the instant the picture has been taken. By recording moments, slices of time, photography is a monument to time passing and to death itself. A number of authors writing on the subject dwell upon this inherent melancholy of photographs, e. g. Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes.

Up until the 1970s, most photographs were still in black and white. In the 19th century, a typical photograph still required up to several minutes of exposure, which meant that all photographs were posed; sitters had to sit still for the duration of the exposure, often fixed in place by apparatuses later edited out of the final print. Those early photographs were not realistic recordings of “real” life as such. The absence of actual colour was also a form of abstraction. The technical limitations of photography to produce entirely realistic looking pictures were enormous. While colour photography existed long before WWII, it was a relatively rare and exotic medium, difficult and expensive to produce and to reproduce, although Kodak had begun to promote it in 1939 with its The Cavalcade of Colour pavillion at the international fair in New York.

From 1950 onwards, this all began to change. Leica had already started producing smaller and much more portable cameras two decades before, and now companies like Kodak – Agfa in Germany, and a host of others – were producing them so cheaply that they became available to the masses. Almost anyone could now take photographs, and in colour, too. Black-and-white pictures were relatively easy to develop at home or in a cheap local lab, whereas the colour development process was techniclly much more demanding and required specialist laboratories in most cases. Kodak was embarking on a gigantic advertising effort to popularise its affordable and easy to use cameras and the new colour films, helped by colour cinematography, which was setting a new visual standard.

Kodak started its most ambitious project to promote colour photography in 1950; it ended almost fourty years later in 1989. The company set out to produce images of “everyday” American life, displaying them at New York’s Grand Central Station, one picture at a time, each measuring a vast 5,5 x 18 metres, under the title of Colorama. Up to 600,000 people would walk past these “world’s largest photographs” every day. Several hundred of these images were produced over the years; the technical challenges facing this project were immense. The cameras had to be especially designed and constructed; nothing like it existed at the time. The photographs were taken on Kodak Ektrachrome slide film of up to 20 x 50 cm in size. Up to 41 strips of film were used in the production of each image. And, of course, each image had to be touched up and corrected and then printed; the technology to print such large formats also had to be developed. Even the actual taking of the photographs involved setting up enormous lighting arrangements, often in fairly remote places because colour film at the time was not very light sensitive.

Quite a number of these original Ektrachrome photographs are in the possession of the Museum Nicéphore-Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône, France. Large scale prints – though not measuring anything like the ones in the original Colorama exhibition – and a few original diapositives are currently being shown at the Pavillion Populaire in Montpellier, France, in the exhibition La Vie en Kodak (Life in Kodak) where I saw them. In order to make these print reproductions, the original Ektachrome slides required significant digital colour correction and editing as the films have acquired a reddish colour shift as they age.

I found myself a bit overwhelmed by the impact these images had on me. Keeping in mind that they had originally been exhibited sequentially whilst this exhibition showed them side-by-side, I was still shocked by a sort of familiarity, probably owed to Hollywood’s long-time visual dominance as well as the pervasiveness of American culture, and their visual opulence. What I saw was this: Relentlessly smiling Americans living the good life, i.e. a middle class, mostly suburban life in well-kempt houses and gardens, driving modern (at the time) cars, wearing colourful, clean, tidy clothes, enjoying a vast range of leisure activities, from surfing, to hunting and fishing in magnificent natural settings, to having a picnic or a barbecue with friends, a young couple’s stroll in a park, or an evening singing in front of the fireplace in a rustic cabin. The clothes always suit the occasion – a hankie tied around the neck in cowboy fashion while horseback riding in the Wild West, lumberjack shirts while hunting, cozy woolly jumpers in front of the fireplace, bright summery dresses for the women in the garden, or sea side attire for a group outing on the boat. Everyone’s hair is perfect; all the men of any age have a full head of hair (I would notice!). Nothing whatsoever displays any signs of use – everything looks spick-and-span and brand new. The Christmases are always white. Children are beautiful and ever so well behaved. And happy… everyone is always happy. If anyone ever became unhappy, they would probably be ostracised from this tribe of happy people. The smiles are a sign that one belongs, as are the accumulated possessions, the houses, pools, cars, boats, and holidays.

Anything with the potential to disrupt the almost celestial splendour and harmony is absent. There is no bad weather; snow is white and the sun always shines. There are no black people, either; maybe they were not happy enough, like ill or disabled people. Indigenous people do exist, but only in colourful costume happily entertaining the happy white people. In spite of the abundance of children, sex is absent. The men and women are like versions of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, handsome and wholesome; the children are the products of budding, one assumes. Clothes and accessories are gender-congruent; men – fathers – hold smokeless pipes in their hands; women, of course, never smoke.

And they all take pictures of each other, their possessions, their angelic children, their pretty spouses, their wealth, their happiness. One image shows them all viewing these pictures in a home slide show. All the people are always posed, aware of being photographed, looking their best, smiling for the camera as in real life.

In a profoundly unsettling way – for a non-American viewer of today – these pictures establish what it means to be American, to belong to this people living in the land of plenty. Happiness – not its mere pursuit, but its attainment – is American. As its prerequisite, one must have money to afford all the things that make happy, and like-minded people with whom to share them. Possessing wealth is American. And importantly, one needs to be seen by others being happy and living the good life of a good American. These pictures set the tone for millions of amateur photographers to follow when recording the aspirational fictions of their own lives, starting with a simple ‘say cheeeeese!’. In their normative rigour, these photographs are more than equals to the visual utopias of totalitarian regimes, from fascism to communism, Nazi-Germany to North Korea.

When Barthes or Sontag spoke of photographs as ‘melancholy objects’, they cannot have thought of these images. The moments they record are staged down to the tiniest fold of a skirt; the memories they may evoke are false memories of a life that never was. The viewer of the Colorama is presented with a normative fiction of life – This is what America looks like! This is what a family looks like! This is what happiness looks like! – which is disseminated through millions of family pictures taken in this style, striving to recreate this vision.

These pictures – and their home made re-creations – cannot be melancholic because the life they record never existed. They may invoke sadness in someone lacking all the things essential to this idea of happiness, e.g. a poor person, but that is not the melancholy of Barthes, which associated with a nostalgia, a looking back in time. The Colorama images and their millions of imitations are projecting forward in time, expressing a longing for a good life, for a happy life, and always considering their reception by others in the future at the time of their making. ‘Will this look good in the photograph?’ – “Honey, don’t squint!… Pull your socks up, Dennis! … “Tom, can you sort out Katie’s hair, please?… No, stand in front of the rhododendron!… Hold up your gift and smile, darling, so grandma can see how much you love it!…”

Colour photography does away with black-and-white’s abstraction; like oil painting, it looks realistic, even hyperrealistic, recording detail not accessible to the naked eye, augmenting colours and freezing movement, but not to the point of abstraction. Like oil painting, colour photography stimulates the senses more than black-and-white; the colour image of a lemon may make the mouth water whereas its b&w version is unlikely to. Colour photography may arouse desire and evoke envy; its more realistic reproduction of the world may even make it seem more credible. The author of a colour photograph is therefore less visible than his b&w white counterpart. Although our world is filled with images that are made to show us other people’s good life, to make us desire things, to make us want to be that happy and fulfilled, comparatively less seems to have been written about them. Even when advertisement had been using colour for a long time, serious writers spoke of photography’s inherent melancholic, but not about its utopian qualities. These utopian aspects – as in this exhibition – must have been staring in their faces; why did they not write about them? Or possibly, why have I not come across this utopian aspect in the books and essays on photography, which I have read?

I can only guess this type of photography was not considered Art (!); advertisements, family photographs and pornographic images (those only made to arouse sexual desire, not as Art) were not being displayed in galleries or museums. There may possibly have also been some contempt for the middle classes aspiring to social prestige and so eager to display it, as well as the advertising industry seen as manipulating and appealing to people’s basest instincts of envy and greed, powered by the dirtiest of all fuels, money. Later generations of photographers did address this in various ways, Cindy Sherman whose staged photographs dissect the American vernacular of Hollywood, advertising and the image of women in them, as well as Richard Prince, Barbara Krueger, Larry Sultan, and a host of others. Yet, the exact dynamic, by which photographic images project into the future, seems to have not been discussed in great length or depth.

At the end of the exhibition, I emerged blinking into the bright afternoon sunlight of Montpellier, deeply moved by these strangely familiar pictures, which unsettled as they seduced. Today’s audiences are possibly more media savvy, more aware of the manipulative potential of images, more distrustful of any utopias, and more pessimistic about the future being brighter. These images may also be a testament to an innocence lost, whilst having been instrumental in that loss.

The story as told by Kodak with a vast gallery of these images can be accessed here.

The press release of the exhibition La Vie en Kodak  at the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier may be downloaded on this page.

The printing quality of the exhibition catalogue is unfortunately of poor quality; the pictures on Kodak’s website are tiny.