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In the last week of December 2010, a railroad worker named Jim DeNike drove from Arkansas to Parsons, Kansas, and loaded a dozen boxes holding nearly 50,000 slides into an old maroon Pontiac. He had sent Dwayne's Photo 1,580 rolls of Kodachrome and paid $15,798 to have them developed, borrowing against his father's retirement account to cover it. Every frame in those boxes was a picture of a train.
DeNike had to drive to Parsons because Parsons was the only place left. Dwayne's Photo ran the last K-14 line on the planet, and Kodak had stopped making the chemistry that fed it. The lab took its final rolls on December 30, 2010, then worked through the backlog for another three weeks. The last roll went through the machine on January 18, 2011, after which the processor was shut down and sold for scrap.
Kodachrome died when one small lab in southeast Kansas went quiet, because a Kodachrome roll was not a color film in any sense a modern photographer would recognize.
The Film That Shipped Without Its Colors
Load a roll of Kodachrome 64 and you are loading three black-and-white emulsions stacked on one strip of acetate. Kodak's processing manual lays out the sandwich from the base up: a subbing layer, a red-sensitive emulsion, an interlayer, a green-sensitive emulsion, another interlayer, a yellow filter layer, a blue-sensitive emulsion, and a gelatin overcoat on top. On the back of the base sat rem-jet, a black antihalation backing that had to be chemically softened and physically buffed off before anything else could happen.
Nowhere in that stack was there an image dye, and nowhere was there a dye coupler. Nearly every other color film you have shot carries its couplers inside the emulsion, waiting for oxidized developer to meet them and form dye in place. Kodachrome carried none. The couplers lived in the developer tanks at the lab, and the color image was manufactured during processing, in the machine, one layer at a time.
That single design decision is why Kodachrome looked the way it did. Couplers are bulky molecules, and a film that has to hold three sets of them needs thick emulsion layers. Thick layers scatter light. Kodachrome's layers could be extremely thin because they carried no couplers at all, only silver halide and sensitizing dye in gelatin, and thin layers scatter less, so the film resolved detail that substantive films of the same era could not. Look at a Kodachrome slide edge-on in raking light and you can see a faint relief image standing up out of the emulsion, a physical record of where dye was built.
Three Developers and Two Beams of Light
Putting the couplers in the developer creates a problem. If cyan coupler is dissolved in a tank and the film goes in, cyan dye forms wherever development happens, in all three layers at once. Kodak's solution was to develop the layers separately, and to use light as the switch.
The sequence in Kodak's own processing manual runs to 17 steps before drying. Backing removal prebath and wash strip the rem-jet. A first developer built on Phenidone and hydroquinone reduces every exposed grain to metallic silver, producing three superimposed black-and-white negatives, one per layer. A wash stops it. What remains undeveloped in each layer is the positive image, and the rest of the process is a matter of getting to that silver halide selectively.
Then the machine turns on a light. The film is printed through the base with a red glass filter, which exposes the remaining halide in the bottom red-sensitive layer and, in principle, nothing else. Into the cyan developer it goes, where a color developing agent develops that newly exposed silver and the oxidized developer couples with cyan coupler to build a cyan dye image confined to the bottom layer. Wash.
Now the second re-exposure, this time through the emulsion surface with a blue filter, hitting the top blue-sensitive layer. The yellow filter layer buried in the middle of the stack limits how much blue light reaches the green-sensitive layer from that direction. Its main job is during the camera exposure, absorbing the blue component of the exposing light so it never reaches the two lower layers, and Kodak's manual is careful to add that it does not protect the green-sensitive layer from stray blue printing light striking the base. The yellow developer then builds yellow dye in the top layer. Wash.
The middle green-sensitive layer gets no light at all. By that point, it is the only layer with silver halide left, so no selectivity is needed. The magenta developer contains a reversal agent that chemically fogs whatever remains, and magenta dye forms in the middle. After that come a conditioner, a bleach that converts all the metallic silver back to silver halide, a fixer that dissolves it away, a final wash, and a final rinse. Everything that made the image visible in the first place, all that silver, is removed. What is left in the film is three dye images that did not exist when the roll was loaded into the camera.
Why K-14 Could Never Become a Home Process
Every step above is a tolerance problem, and the tolerances stack. Kodak's manual is blunt about the cost of getting the two printing steps wrong. Overprint the blue step and you fog the green-sensitive layer, which then takes yellow dye it should never have received. Underprint it and halide survives into the magenta developer, contaminating the yellow layer with magenta. The correct exposure levels were established by photographic testing for each individual film type, then locked into computer-controlled printers inside the processor. The manual's instruction to the operator is a single sentence: "For anything other than a lamp failure, call Kodak for service."
The wet chemistry is no more forgiving. Four developers, three of them carrying their own coupler, each needing replenishment at the right rate. A bleach that has to be aerated continuously, because iron III reduced to iron II during bleaching will not bleach anything until air converts it back, and under-aerated bleach leaves retained silver that raises every density in the frame. A magenta developer wash that the manual calls "the most critical of all the wash steps," because magenta developer components are the hardest to get out of the gelatin.
None of that scales down to a kitchen counter. E-6 and C-41 run in a tank there because the couplers are in the film and the operator only has to hold time, temperature, and agitation. Kodak did shrink the machine, and it is worth knowing how far: the K-LAB processor, introduced in 1999 for smaller labs, cut the footprint from the 1,000 square feet a full K-14 installation needed, with its analytical lab and chemical stores, to 46 square feet, running 75 to 100 rolls an hour on nitrogen-packed premixed chemistry that removed the need for in-house analysis. It was still expensive, still complicated, and still tied to Kodak, and the project was short-lived. K-14 required a calibrated optical printer inside the machine, nine separate chemical solutions plus a string of washes between them, continuous process control, and a chemistry supply that only Kodak made. At the peak, there were about 25 K-14 labs in the world. Kodak's last American lab, at Fair Lawn, New Jersey, closed in 2004; its final lab anywhere, in Lausanne, shut in 2006, after which film posted to the Swiss address was quietly forwarded to Kansas; and Horiuchi Color in Tokyo stopped by 2007, when Kodak discontinued the packaged chemistry. Dwayne's Photo, which had picked up Kodachrome in the early 1990s as one more low-volume specialty, was the last one standing. Kodak's 2009 retirement announcement said it plainly: "For all of its magic, KODACHROME is a complex film to manufacture and an even more complex film to process."
The Last Roll Was Not Steve McCurry's
The story that gets retold is that Steve McCurry shot the last roll of Kodachrome, an odyssey through New York and western India and finally to Parsons, ending with the film in the world's last processor. Kodak did give McCurry a roll from the end of the production run, and he did plan the trip for nine months and hand-carry the film to Kansas rather than trust it to an airport scanner. Thirty-one distinct images came off those 36 frames, including Robert De Niro, Elliott Erwitt, and Rabari tribespeople in Rajasthan. Prints from that roll are held by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, which took delivery from McCurry at a press conference inside the building in June 2012. "I don't think there's ever been, in the history of photography, a better film, a better way to actually look at the world than with Kodachrome," McCurry said at the museum. "This was the only way I shot for decades."
His roll ran through the machine at Dwayne's in July 2010, six months before the line stopped. Dozens of photographers, amateur and professional, asked for the honor of the final roll, and the lab settled the question internally: it would belong to Dwayne Steinle, who had opened the business more than half a century earlier after a Kodak representative warned him the area was too thinly populated to support it. Steinle spent a week shooting his house, his family, and downtown Parsons. The last frame on the last roll is a group portrait of the staff standing in front of the building in commemorative yellow shirts, printed with an epitaph: "The best slide and movie film in history is now officially retired. Kodachrome: 1935-2010."
What Came Through the Door in Parsons
Rolls that had sat in freezers and closets for decades came in from six continents in the final weeks, and The New York Times reported that a processor which normally ran a few hours a day was running around the clock. On the final day, the lab told ABC News it had taken in about 500 FedEx packages and 18 bags of Post Office mail. An artist named Aliceson Carter, 42, flew from London to Wichita on her first trip to the United States, drove straight to Parsons with three rolls to turn in, and shot five more before the deadline. Watching DeNike load his 50,000 slides into the Pontiac, she said, "That's crazy to me," then photographed him on one of her last rolls. A Los Angeles pathologist, Bharat Nathwani, was still sitting on 400 unused rolls. "I might hold it, God willing that Kodak sees its lack of wisdom," he said.
Lanie George, who managed the Kodachrome department, said the volume caught them off guard. One of the notes on the lab wall read, "I took this to a drugstore and they didn't even know what it was." The backlog is the reason the December 30 deadline and the actual end date are three weeks apart. The film that beat the cutoff still had to be processed, and Kodak's last shipment of chemistry had to last exactly that long.
Why Nobody Can Bring It Back as a Service
Kodak brought Ektachrome back in 2018, and you can buy Kodak Professional Ektachrome E100 in 35mm and 120 today. That revival was possible because E100 runs in E-6, a process with couplers in the film and labs on every continent. In January 2017, Kodak's then chief marketing officer, Steven Overman, said on the company's own podcast that Kodak was looking at what a Kodachrome revival would require, and explained that Ektachrome had gone first because it was the easier of the two. Nothing came of the Kodachrome half.
Making the film again would be the easier half, and Kodak still called that half complex. Reviving Kodachrome means rebuilding a processing operation for a process that needs four proprietary developers, a calibrated two-color optical printer inside the machine, and a manufacturer willing to answer the phone when a lamp drifts. The film only becomes a color film at the end of that chain, and the chain was scrapped in Parsons in January 2011.
You can still find frozen Kodachrome on auction sites, and you can still shoot it. Film Rescue International, one of the labs that specializes in dead processes, will take it, and with no K-14 line left its service runs the film to a black-and-white negative and puts the color back digitally. That is the commercial position, not a law of chemistry. VSCO spent two years on the problem starting in 2017, synthesized its own cyan, yellow and magenta developers because Kodak's are long out of production, built hardware to run them, and got color out of Kodachrome chemically. It did that to have accurate reference frames for a film-simulation preset, not to open a lab, and nobody has turned it into a service you can post film to. Its quality chart is more particular than the reputation suggests: Kodachrome 64 turns up under both good and very good results, while the very poor category is reserved for Kodachrome over fifty years old carrying no suffix, and for film cooked in an attic or a car. Software gets closer to the look than chemistry now does, and film-simulation tools like DxO FilmPack, covered in this course, are the practical route to that palette.
Dwayne's is still open, still in Parsons, and still developing film, by a 2022 account 17,000 to 20,000 rolls a week of C-41, E-6, and black and white for a customer base that grew back after the digital collapse. The one machine it cannot run is the one that made Kodachrome a color film, and there are 50,000 slides of trains in Arkansas that exist because one man got them to Kansas in time.
Lead image by Jack Delano, public domain. Source.
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