Colorama: A ‘Mad Men’ Creation in Colossal and Vivid Color
In this time of Instagram’s palm-sized square images, it is hard to imagine walking through the cavern of Grand Central Station and looking up to see a 60-foot-wide panoramic transparency of India’s Taj Mahal, astronauts in space, a field of Oregon wheat, Machu Picchu in Peru, a seaplane on Lake Placid, or skiers landing by plane near the Matterhorn in Switzerland. Yet millions did, courtesy of an advertising campaign by Kodak.
The Rochester company used the Colorama, its name for the world’s largest transparency, to promote its film products to the commuters and travelers who passed through the station from 1950 to 1990.
The Southampton Arts Center has an exhibition of these images, in smaller, but still panoramic prints through Dec. 31. The images, chosen from a total of 565 installed at the station over those four decades, are mostly from the 1960s and focus on the idealized world concocted by advertisers for white upper middle-class America in colossal size and intense color.
Walking by these images, which stood almost two stories high, one can sense Don Draper of “Mad Men” hurrying along to his track for the train back to Ossining after a long day of brainstorming advertising copy, drinking martinis, and chasing women in the city. It was a world he could have created and admired: a jolly family at bath time, reading a picture book by the fire, an outing to the zoo to see the giraffes, a couple cavorting in a botanic garden when the tulips are in bloom. They very well could be vivid visions wrought from the fictional character’s background of deprivation and the imagined bounty and beauty of the bourgeoisie channeled through his empty heart. These are scenes of yearning and aspiration.
Equal parts Currier and Ives, Norman Rockwell (who was actually one of the photographers), and jet-setting space-age reverie, they represent the best of capitalism in the middle of the Cold War, a world of abundance, recreation, and leisure. Photographers such as Ansel Adams captured farmers harvesting wheat in Oregon, fishermen in a Portuguese village, and cowboys in the Grand Tetons, but labor is downplayed. Its depiction either provides a scenic background or is ignored in favor of dancing at a discotheque, waterskiing five-across in Florida, boating to a cove in the Bahamas, or biking on the Monterey Peninsula.
America looks young, vibrant, and free-ranging. Its inhabitants follow the sun to San Diego or Miami or travel to exotic locales in Asia and Europe, recently made faster and easier by plane. According to the Kodak company blog, Edward Steichen, a photographer who began his career as part of the Alfred Stieglitz circle and lived into his 90s, sent a telegram back to Kodak after the first Colorama was revealed in 1950 stating: “Everyone in Grand Central agog and smiling. All just feeling good.”
Although the prints indicate a wide variety of subject matter, there is one constant. Someone in the frame is always taking a photograph of a portion of the scene. After all, these are advertisements, and not just for the camera. The campaign was developed in the post-war period to introduce mass market color film as an antidote for the preceding gray decades, and what also had to be an inspiration for the hue-saturated fashion and design of the era.
The images were feats of analog technology. According to the Kodak blog, “each print required a task force of Kodak experts.” The photographers, sometimes famous like Ansel Adams and Elliott Porter, but often Kodak employees, would use large format cameras to make 8-by-20-inch negatives. Given the costliness of the materials, they had to achieve perfection in just a few shots looking at an image upside down and in reverse while they were taking it. One photographer told Kodak, “There were no mulligans.”
The size required printing the transparency in strips that were spliced together, first with glue and later a tape that Kodak invented to make the process easier. Having nothing large enough to dry the transparencies in, the technicians co-opted the company pool where they placed them overnight to dry. Once ready, they were rolled up and trucked down to New York City. The new images, typically turned over every two to three weeks, were installed overnight “for the much anticipated reveal just in time for the morning commute,” according to Kodak.
In later years, Kodak did become more inclusive in its choice of subjects. It culminated in one of their most successful and iconic photographs of 15 seated babies lined up in a row. Taken in 1984 just around the time of the “United Colors of Benetton” campaign, the picture is a rainbow of skin tones and onesies.
It is understandable why the George Eastman Museum focused on this period in time when it first put together the exhibition in 2010 to mark the two decades since their removal. It is cohesive and instructive, revealing an America self-conscious in its sense of place. It freezes moments in time as if Kodak realized people would look back through the haze of memory and refer to them as the “good old days.”
The show’s opening the weekend after this year’s presidential election was no doubt coincidental, but it is hard not to see the exhibition in that refracted light. It carries with it a suggestion of something less dazzling and more menacing, the kind of world an increasingly vocal minority of white supremacists might wish to revisit, even though it never actually existed.