The Last Roll and Ara Güler Too

Steve McCurry has posted nine frames from the ceremonial last-ever roll of Kodachrome on his blog. Steve took the assignment very seriously, traveling around the world and including portraits of stars like Robert De Niro and Amitabh Bachchan (the second name won't mean much to readers in the U.S., but it will to readers in India) as well as some of the colorful native portraits for which is he is best known.

Ara Güler by Steve McCurry, from the last roll of Kodachrome

Much bigger stars to me are Elliot Erwitt and Ara Güler, no less! Ara, éminence grise of Turkish photography, is the auteur of Ara Güler's Istanbul: 40 Years of Photographs, a splendid volume I added to my library only last year.

Always nice to see celebrity portraits. (Ebru Ceylan—yes, of those famous Ceylans; Ebru is Nuri's wife—has a nice recent portrait of the Armenian-Turkish maestro at her website, too—third one down at the link.)

The glittering locales, characteristic Asians, and famous faces notwithstanding, the best shot on Steve's roll might be the very last, taken at a Parsons cemetery when he went there to turn the roll in to Dwayne's. A fitting ending for God and Man's old warhorse, and a picture that, I predict, will remain known in photography's history, down through the years to come.

Mike
(Thanks to Luc Novovitch)

ADDENDUM: Oops! Speaking of expiration dates, I think the expiration date on this auction might have just gone past. :-) (Thanks to Oren Grad for this.)

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Comments

[Skip Davis]

I remember from the 50’s as a young man, ( I was 16 then) I would attend slide shows at the local Sierra Club meetings. Almost everyone used Kodachrome and an Argus C3 camera. That setup was almost the standard for backpacking then.

It is nice to have such memories to fall back on. So much was low tech then and so easy to understand.

Skip

[Avram Levi]

Great to see Ara Guler being recognized in this last roll. I got a chance to very briefly meet him while I was casually eating lunch at his cafe (named Ara Cafe, located on a nice alleyway in Istanbul).

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is an excellent photographer (aside from being an award winning filmmaker/director), his Turkey Cinemascope series is excellent. http://www.nuribilgeceylan.com/photography/turkeycinemascope1.php?sid=1

[Mike Johnston]

"So much was low tech then and so easy to understand."

Skip,
Of course, low tech was relative--in the spirit of George Eastman (the person), a lot of the difficulty of color photography was hidden from the public (and C3-wielding backpackers). The tech behind Kodachrome was anything but low. Its robust lifespan testifies to that.

Mike

[Mike]

I'd be delighted to get nine pictures like that on a roll! And the colour is just great, even after all these years.

Nowadays I'm shooting Portra and looking forward to the new 400, but the Kodachrome is still lovely.

MIke

[BobRapp]

I have been in the process of scanning my dad's 35mm side collection. Many of the frames are from the late 30s and even include pictures of me from 1945!

It appears that dad had 35mm camera and a Kodak Bantam which uses 828 film (think of it as a super slide as the image size is much greater)

Surprisingly, all the images hold up (with exception of non-Kodachrome slides).

[Fred]

Has the last roll (Dwayne's own) actually been processed? There have been many articles that say it has but in reading them it is obvious that they have simply taken the New York Times article information and made it their own, changing the tense from future to past (and often introducing errors, the wildest being that Dwayne's itself is being sold for scrap).

[Mike Johnston]

Fred,
I have no way of knowing when the last roll will be processed...maybe not for a while now. The deadline for Dwayne's to receive the film was noon on the 30th. How long it will take them to get through the pile I don't know. I'd suggest just checking back at the Dwayne's website for possible updates.

The roll taken by Steve McCurry was the last roll sold by Kodak. I don't remember when exactly that was but it was a while ago now.

Mike

[Cem Usakligil]

"Great to see Ara Guler being recognized in this last roll. ....Nuri Bilge Ceylan is an excellent photographer (aside from being an award winning filmmaker/director), his Turkey Cinemascope series is excellent."

I fully agree with Avram. Coincidentally, we were discussing this very same topic the other day over there at the openphotographyforums. Ara Guler was/is the defining photographer of Istanbul and I was born and raised there. My early photography revolved entirely around Istanbul as my main subject.

Nuri Bilge was a classmate of mine at the university and I have been really privileged to share the joy of photography with him in our photography club.

So glad to see those two heroes of mine coming together in a post in TOP :-).

Cheers and a happy new year to all of you!

[Patrick Love]

Thank you for bringing Ara Guler to our attention.
I also recommend his cafe, if you are ever on Istiklal street.
The magic of Istanbul is that you can still take pictures like to ones Ara took 50 years ago.

[David]

A brief flurry of scanning some old family slides from the '70s last summer reminded me of one reason (and for me, the most important one) why I switched to digital a few years ago.

Despite digital's particular and varied challenges to being safely archived, at least they can be archived.

In other words, even though all the old slides were carefully stored in climate-controlled homes, only the Kodachromes of course still looked great. All the E-6 slides are essentially worthless---washed out and with shifting color.

But what do I know? I suppose there were/are some other ?? films that hold up longer? A fleeting dalliance with my film camera was stunted last year when I realized what I was shooting probably wouldn't last as long as my digital files would or could without needing to scan them.