Kodachrome: The American Invention of Our World, 1939-1959

Paul Simon, “Kodachrome” (song)
"Kodachrome, you give us those nice bright colors, you give us the greens of summers. Oh yeah!"

The Atlanta Constitution Journal, December 1, 2002
"...the jaw-dropping magnificence of Els Rijper's 'Kodachrome' has forced a re-evaluation of Simon's catchy number."

Book Description
A popular history of 20th-century visual culture, Kodachrome: The American Invention of Our World 1939-1959 shows how the American point of view in full-color became an international standard. The book opens with a selection of rarely reproduced color images from the Depression through the early days of World War II. The bright, cosmopolitan atmosphere of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York contrasts with a foreboding glimpse of Hitler’s pre-war Berlin. Early photographs of the devastation in Warsaw and London are presented together with pictures of sharecroppers and homesteaders in the United States. Fashion plates and candid portraits of Satchmo, Frida Kahlo and Helena Rubenstein share the pages that follow with coverage of the War through the liberation of Buchenwald, the conference at Yalta, and the wreckage of Berlin and Hiroshima. The book continues through the late 40s and into the 50s with a wide-ranging assortment of images from the worlds of fashion, politics, sports, and popular culture. Among the personalities, places, and events pictured are Marilyn Monroe, Joe Di Maggio, Gene Autry, Elvis, Pablo Picasso, Eero Saarinen’s studio, shop windows in Manhattan, the Korean War, and the A-bomb tests at the Marshall Islands and Bikini Atoll.

From the Publisher
With its rich reds, verdant greens, and deep blues, Kodachrome film has provided the palette from which American dreams are rendered. Kodachrome: The American Invention of Our World 1939-1959 is an astonishingly vivid collection of images preserved in the jewel-like colors with which "Kodachrome" has become synonymous. Els Rijper’s selection of images from the period of Kodachrome’s greatest impact provides the viewer with a fresh perspective on the collective photographic dreamscape of a nation coming to terms with itself—prior to, during, and in the wake of a global conflict.

About the Author
Before dedicating her career to editing and preserving photographic images, Els Rijper worked as an actress and modern dancer in Europe and the United States. Her efforts on behalf of the Bettmann and UPI photographic archives have resulted in a comprehensive Preservation Plan that will protect millions of negatives, transparencies, and photographs for centuries without hindering access for reproduction and scanning. Kodachrome: The American Invention of Our World 1939-1959 is her first book.


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Although commercial color film was first produced in 1907, it was not widely used until the mid-nineteen-fifties, so when we think of people and events from the first half of the twentieth century we tend to imagine them in black-and-white. In fact, from the mid-thirties Kodak's Kodachrome process offered a remarkably colorfast and permanent image. The stunning pictures in this book show subjects familiar from black-and-white photography -- Georgia sharecroppers, New York City traffic beneath the Third Avenue El, Hugo Jaeger's Nazi Berlin -- but invigorated by a vivid palette that makes them feel startlingly contemporary. Unfortunately, Kodak, worried about losing business for its other, less stable color stocks, never made Kodachrome's superior durability a public selling point, and so the corpus of surviving color images is smaller than it might have been.


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