4/01/2007

Mama don't take












I stumbled across this post from December at Daily Kos today. Did you know that the Kodachrome color process was first commercialized in 1937? The linked post includes a couple of dozen color photos (including the ones here) taken before the attack on Pearl Harbor. It's kinda eerie somehow... unnaturally alive. It gives you a jolt of '"Hey, there were real full-color people alive back then?!?"

This last one is from shorpy. com, a very cool photo blog. The photo is from 1942, and absolutely gorgeous. My mind is blown. Somehow I'd slipped into the comfortable feeling that color had been invented in my lifetime - after all, it didn't show up in any of the family photo albums until around the time I was born. I guess I've been... well, what's the term for someone who has judged the past to have been black and white?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fantastic photo. My mind is similarly blown.

I remember Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) asking his dad why old photos are black and white. His dad tells him that the world was black and white back then, and only recently became color. Calvin then astutely asks why old paintings are in color, and his dad explains that most artists were insane and had a skewed view of the world anyway.

Viola Zuppa said...

I found a gallery of WWII photos in color:

http://www.ww2incolor.com/gallery/ww2incolor

Of course they were making feature-length movies in color in 1939 so it makes sense that still photography would be around.

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