Bitter sweet feelings.

Kodachrome was the first and last color slide film I used, before migrating to color negative when emulsions equalled and exceeded Kodachrome for quality and contrast range. Then along came digital and film was no more.

Kodak gave its last roll of Kodachrome to National Geographic snapper Steve McCurry and his last picture on the last roll was of the Parsons, Kansas cemetery, the town with the last Kodachrome processing lab. So even if you can find some Kodachrome, you can no longer get it processed.

The last snap on the last roll. Parsons, Kansas.

Click the picture for the NPR article.

It is not this journal’s goal to indulge in political discussion. However, when the hydra of politics begins to threaten our most basic freedoms, it is important to draw attention to the reality. In England, for example, a nation increasingly resembling a police state, just try pointing your camera at something when a cop is present. In France, woe betide you if you wear a rag on your head. As goes Europe, so goes America. How long before our first photographer is incarcerated as a ‘threat’ to national security?

But not all was bad with the year just ending. Most significantly, we have seen the stirrings of global free speech through the courageous acts of an Australian journalist whose WikiLeaks publication has started exposing all governments for the frauds and cheats they are. Those seeking proof need look no further than the outpourings of vituperation and threat from those very governments so clearly exposed. If you were an unelected apparatchik of a government which afforded you easy money for no work, you too would consider your job mightily threatened by this sort of thing and that is what we are seeing in the press today.

So for all of you believing that the First Amendment to the US Constitution is a Good Thing in need of daily defense and support, all of you tired of perpetual war, all of you disgusted with a world ruled by banksters and corrupt oil men and purchased politicians and morally bankrupt diplomats and warmongers and despots and torturers, wrapping themselves in the flag, caring nothing about the next generation, let me take a moment to remind you of the words of that great piece of US constitutional prose:

I fondly hope that all global hegemonies are mightily exposed by what is happening in the world of disclosure and look forward, perhaps naïvely, to a better future.

So Kodachrome, thanks for a great past and Mr. WikiLeaks, thank you for a promising future. We can but hope that US gaols remain free of photographers.

For an earlier version of this brave journalist, one who worked before the invention of cameras, click here.

And you can read all about Kodachrome here