They say all good things in life come to an end. Kodak retired KODACHROME Film on June 22 2009, concluding its 74-year run and announced Kodachrome would no longer be manufactured.

Kodachrome is the trademarked brand name of a type of color reversal film that was manufactured by Eastman Kodak from 1935 to 2009. Kodachrome was the first successfully mass-marketed color still film using a subtractive method, in contrast to earlier additive “screenplate” methods such as Autochrome and Dufaycolor, and remained the oldest brand of color film.

Over its 74-year production, Kodachrome was produced in formats to suit various still and motion picture cameras, including 8mm, Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm for movies and 35mm, 120, 110,126, 127, 828, and large format for still photography. It was for many years used for professional color photography, especially for images intended for publication in print media.

Kodachrome is appreciated in the archival and professional market because of its color accuracy and dark-storage longevity. Because of these qualities, Kodachrome is used by professional photographers like Steve McCurry and Alex Webb. McCurry used Kodachrome for his well-known 1984 portrait of Sharbat Gula, the “Afghan Girl” for the National Geographic magazine.

Steve McCurry, whose picture of a young Afghan girl captured the hearts of millions of people around the world as she peered hauntingly from the cover of National Geographic Magazine in 1985, offered these words: 

“The early part of my career was dominated by KODACHROME, and I reached for that film to shoot some of my most memorable images,” said McCurry. “While KODACHROME Film was very good to me, I have since moved on to other films and digital to create my images. In fact, when I returned to shoot the ‘Afghan Girl’ 17 years later, I used Kodak’s E100VS film to create that image, rather than KODACHROME Film as with the original.”