
The Last Roll of Kodachrome
Kodak stopped making Kodachrome film in 2009, and gave the final roll ever produced to photographer Steve McCurry, best known for his portrait of the green-eyed Afghan girl that ran on the cover of National Geographic. The film follows McCurry as he decides how to spend all 36 frames, traveling from New York to India to photograph subjects he considers worth the last of a medium that shaped decades of photojournalism. He visits the Kodak plant in Parsons, Kansas, the only lab left able to process the film, and hands the roll over in person, aware that once it is developed there will be no more. Interviews with McCurry and Kodak technicians explain what made Kodachrome's chemistry and color different from digital or other film stocks, and why professionals kept shooting it long after cheaper options existed. The film works as a small elegy for a specific piece of photographic technology, told through the last person trusted to use it.