Last Roll Unspools

Paul Simon singing about the film that chronicled the world for close to a century,and was immortalised in pop music. But,at the turn of the century,the greens of summer,and the gold of a sunny day got sharper on LCD screens of digital SLRs. Digital photography eventually killed the 74-year-old Kodachrome star — a death announced in 2009,when Kodak said it would discontinue manufacture of the film. Its passing was bemoaned by amateurs and professionals alike,all of whom had captured the colours of sunrise,the red of a melting lollipop in a child’s hand or a moment in history — on this film.

But the last roll of Kodachrome would produce great photography yet.

American photographer Steve McCurry,most famous for his National Geographic cover photo (June,1985) of the Afghan girl,and who worked for decades on Kodachrome,procured the last roll from the assembly line in Rochester,New York. From May to July 2010,he travelled through India,America and Turkey shooting on it.

The Last Roll of Kodachrome begins with a photo of Robert DeNiro in New York and fittingly ends at a cemetery in Parsons,home to the last photographic lab in the world that developed the film. A scraggy bouquet of red and yellow flowers lies at the foot of a statue in the cemetery,evocative of Kodak’s signature colours. Grand Central,the bustling transit hub of New York,is rendered ghostly with wraith-like figures passing through a side-corridor close to midnight. History and mythology criss-cross in a sculpture studio in Mumbai,as a worker makes god and men from stone.

What did it feel like to shoot the last photo on this roll? “I shot with this film for 30 years,and I have several hundred thousand pictures on Kodachrome in my archive.

I tried to shoot these pictures to act as some kind of wrap-up to that legacy — to mark the passing of Kodachrome. It was a wonderful film,” says the 60-year-old.

Much of what he has seen has vanished,but lives on in its documentation. “There was a lot of poetry and culture and I find it very sad that it’s gone,but to have documented it,and to be able to look back at the pictures,and to be able to appreciate it and to have that memory of that beauty or that way of life is really important,” he says.

For this New Yorker,who has visited India nearly 85 times,India and New York were obvious locations to shoot the last roll. “New York is my home,but,photographically,India fascinates me the most. You cannot find another country with such a rich and varied geography and culture,” he says. In 20-odd portraits shot in India,he captures its diversity,from working-class resilience to the allure of tribal magicians and the starriness of Bollywood. Shekhar Kapur rests informally on the floor,surrounded by books,with a cup of tea in hand,while Aamir Khan stares with quiet smugness into the lens. Amitabh Bachchan rests his hand on his self-portrait,and looks into the camera with the langour of a lion in his den. McCurry found Amitabh Bachchan “fascinating” during his interaction but refuses to read too much into the portrait. He says,a tad evasively,“Obviously,this is the world this man lives in,but it is one that the public has helped to create.”

In Rajasthan,near Abu Road,he photographed the Rabari tribals — the men with elaborate moustaches and turbans performed magic tricks for him; the women were shy,but were coaxed into posing for portraits that share the haunting beauty of the green-eyed Afghan girl.

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“If you want to be a photographer,first leave home. As Paul Theroux,a great writer and friend,advises,go as far as you can. Become a stranger in a strange land. Acquire humility. Leaving home really means that the photographer (or writer) has to wander,observe,and to paraphrase Theroux,concentrate on people in their landscape. That is what I try to achieve in my pictures,” says McCurry in his blog.

His earliest memories of photographs,though,are at home — flipping through LIFE magazines in his grandmother’s basement. In his long career,he followed his own advice: covered civil wars and revolutions,soldiers and daily heroes. The photojournalist’s career was launched when he entered rebel-controlled Afghanistan,just before the Russian invasion in the early 1980s. He escaped with rolls stitched into his clothes,his images the first that the world saw of the conflict zone. McCurry found inspiration in Henri Cartier-Bresson and “people living their everyday lives”; his photos from across the world told us of lives that were different from us but with which we connected at the level of humanity.

Photography allowed him to explore and understand the world. Be it the Buddhist countries,where he enjoyed shooting for their sense of wisdom,or his own city,New York,on 9/11. For the first time,McCurry didn’t have to travel a great distance to an area of conflict,he only had to take the elevator to the roof of his building to shoot that terrible day. He calls it a life-changing event for bringing the “war on terror” to his doorstep.

McCurry has been coming to India since his graduation and feels that India has been one of “the most important places” he has worked in over the last three decades. “It was the first country that I travelled to as a young photographer. The mix of Hinduism,Buddhism,Sikhism,Islam,Christianity — and how they intermingled was a source of fascination,” he says. “There is a beautiful sort of chaos to India that is visually rich. It is very easy to feel like you belong in a nation of so much diversity.” His curiosity and passion,though,have ensured that he has remained a stranger,even if he feels at home here.

The end of Kodachrome is the end of a legacy but digital photography hasn’t really changed the way he sees or the way he photographs. “I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing,” he says.