August 5, 2010

Steve McCurry Takes The Last Roll Of Kodachrome Around

The World For Final Photos

By BEN DOBBIN

Rochester, New York (AP) What should a photographer shoot when he is entrusted with the very last roll of Kodachrome?

Steve McCurry took aim at the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Terminal and a few human icons, too. Paul Simon, the crooner synonymous with the fabled film’s richly saturated colors, shied away. But Robert De Niro stood in for the world of filmmaking.

Then McCurry headed from his base in New York City to southern Asia, where in 1984 he shot a famous portrait of a green-eyed Afghan refugee girl that made the cover of National Geographic. In India, he snapped a tribe whose nomadic way of life is disappearing, just as Kodachrome is.

The world’s first commercially successful color film, extolled since the Great Depression for its sharpness, archival durability and vibrant yet realistic hues, ``makes you think,’’ as Simon sings, ``all the world’s a sunny day.’’

Kodachrome enjoyed its mass-market heyday in the 1960s and ‘70s before being eclipsed by video and easy-to-process color negative films, the kind that prints are made from. It garnered its share of spectacular images, none more iconic than Abraham Zapruder’s reel of President John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

Photo: McCurry and his famous 1984 photo of an Afghan girl

But Mama Time is taking Kodachrome away, and McCurry feels the tug of nostalgia even as he loads Eastman Kodak Co.’s last manufactured roll into his Nikon F6, just as he’s done ``so many tens of thousands of times.’’

From that moment on, ``there’s a certain amount of observation and walking around, exploring, hunting, moving,’’ McCurry said of his craft. ``It’s not all about taking pictures. It’s about appreciating this world we live in for such a brief amount of time.

``I thought, what better way to kind of honor the memory of the film than to try and photograph iconic places and people? It’s in (my) DNA to want to tell stories where the action is, that shed light on the human condition.’’

Betting its future on digital photography, Kodak discontinued the slide and motion-picture film with a production run last August in which a master sheet nearly a mile (1.6 kilometers) long was cut up into more than 20,000 rolls.

McCurry requested the final 36-exposure strip. After nine months of planning, he embarked in June on a six-week odyssey. Trailing him was a TV crew from National Geographic Channel, which plans to broadcast a one-hour documentary early next year.

National Geographic magazine is considering doing a spread on McCurry’s trip that would include a handful of images. All the originals are destined for air-conditioned safekeeping at the George Eastman House film and photography museum in Rochester.

McCurry relied on a digital camera to help evaluate composition, perspective and light, but choosing the moment to press the shutter was pressure-packed. Even seasoned photographers have a hard time knowing when ``you’re going to get that one emotional component to the picture,’’ McCurry said.

His nerves were jangled again when he had to run the loaded camera through airport X-ray machines in Italy and Turkey. One security guard joked, ``’Oh, take a picture,’ which was kind of funny because we were trying to make every frame count.’’

Curry returned to old haunts in western India where ``color is important culturally,’’ drawing on Kodachrome’s magical power to subtly render contrast and color harmony in depictions of Ribari tribespeople in Rajasthan and Bollywood luminaries in Mumbai.

His journey ended in July in small-town Parsons, Kansas, the home of Dwayne’s Photo, the last photo lab in the world that processes the elaborately crafted color-reversal film. Dwayne’s will close that part of its business in December.

``It’s not a process like black-and-white that hobbyists could do in their own dark room,’’ co-owner Grant Steinle said, warning Kodachrome hoarders ``they really need to get out and shoot those pictures’’ and perhaps shift over to newer lines of slide film like Ektachrome and Fujichrome.

In McCurry’s roll, one or two exposures were a little off, but he was pleased with the results. In one self-portrait, he posed next to a Kodak-yellow taxicab bearing the license plate PKR 36, the code name for Professional Kodachrome film; in another, he’s sprawled on a hotel bed at journey’s end.

McCurry has a personal archive of 800,000 Kodachrome images he takes good care of. But in late July, he chanced upon a batch of 1969 and 1972 Kodachromes he’d put in storage in Philadelphia long ago and forgotten about. The discovery got him reminiscing about his days as a hungry photographer hopping from Amsterdam to Africa to Soviet-era Bulgaria.

``Not only was the color really good, but they were actually not bad pictures,’’ McCurry marveled.

``Imagine leaving digital images in a hard drive and coming back 40 years later. Would anybody be able to read that data? That’s the great thing about film. It’s a self-contained object. You hold the picture up to the light and there it is.’’

Last Carnegie Hall Residents Forced To Leave As Iconic Artist's

Headquarters Succumbs To Grand Remodeling

By VERENA DOBNIK

New York (AP) All of her neighbors are gone, forced out. Now Elizabeth Sargent, the last holdout tenant of Carnegie Hall’s towers, is preparing to leave the affordable studios that for more than a century housed some of America’s most brilliant creative artists.

Red scaffolding surrounds Carnegie Hall as the city-owned towers are being gutted this summer in a $200 million renovation that includes adding a youth music program. Celebrities like Robert De Niro and Susan Sarandon had fought to save the homes, petitioning the city not to ``displace these treasured artists and master teachers.’’

Musicians, painters, dancers and actors thrived in the two towers built by 19th-century industrialist Andrew Carnegie just after the hall went up in 1891. The towers, one 12 stories high, the other 16, housed more than 100 studios, some with special skylights installed to give painters the northern light they prize.

Over the years, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly and Robert Redford took acting lessons here and Lucille Ball had voice coaching. James Dean studied scripts and Leonard Bernstein, music.

Women once lined up on the street to visit an alluring resident, the young Marlon Brando. His studio space on the eighth floor was demolished in early July.

Sargent, a one-time dancer noted for her boldly sexual poetry, is now in her 80s and in remission from cancer. For 40 years, she’s lived on the ninth floor of the red brick southern tower above the famed stage of the 119-year-old landmark.

She has until Aug. 31 to clear out.

Sargent and other residents have waged a years-long legal battle against New York City, the Carnegie Hall Corp., and a powerful, modern-day philanthropist, Sanford ``Sandy’’ Weill, the former chairman and CEO of Citigroup. The refurbished towers will soon house an education program named for Weill, Carnegie Hall’s chairman and benefactor, plus other administrative spaces, according to Carnegie artistic director Clive Gillinson.

When Carnegie Hall announced the project in May 2007, 18 studios were occupied and dozens of other artists rented teaching space.

Editta Sherman, a 98-year-old photographer, had a studio that’s still filled with portraits of Hollywood and Broadway stars. She’s not been allowed to sleep there since early July and must also remove her belongings by Aug. 31.

Known by her neighbors as the ``Duchess of Carnegie Hall,’’ Sherman vowed two years ago that she’d never leave. ``They’ll have to drag me out,’’ she said.

``My whole life has been here!’’ said Sherman. A resident since 1949, she raised five children in a studio with 25-foot (7 1/2-meter) ceilings and a view of Central Park. Her rent was frozen at $650 a month.

Finally, the two women signed agreements with Carnegie in exchange for new midtown Manhattan apartments where rents will be subsidized by Carnegie for the rest of their lives.

``I’d rather live in these rundown rooms than any new apartment in a glass tower,’’ said the reclusive Sargent, speaking to a reporter by telephone from behind her studio door. She reached a hand into the hallway to retrieve a bag of groceries left on the knob by a former neighbor.

An Associated Press team toured the construction site and obtained exclusive photos and video of the tower renovation, zeroing in on controversial spots, historic parts of the building being torn down.

The old stone-and-cast-iron staircases and some original walls will survive, according to architectural plans for the towers obtained by the AP.

What’s left inside is just a shadow of the bustling labyrinth of corridors, stairways and studios where modern American dance took its first steps, created by choreographers like George Balanchine and Martha Graham.

Debris now spills down a stairway leading to a rooftop studio. ``SAVE’’ is scrawled on a wall in red, with a line to guide workers when they chop off a ceiling and skylight built in the 1890s.

In 1960, developers wanted to tear down the entire Carnegie Hall building to construct a high-rise on the site. But violinist Isaac Stern led a successful public campaign against demolition and the city bought the property for $5 million, creating the Carnegie Hall Corp. to run it.

``It’s Weill’s money, but it’s our history, and this is the endgame here,’’ said actor Billy Lyons, 29, assistant to acting coach Wynn Handman, who had worked from a Carnegie studio since the early 1980s, training actors including Denzel Washington, Mira Sorvino and Michael Douglas.

The towers will be rebuilt as new music education spaces and classrooms, archives and administrative offices for the Carnegie Hall staff.

``They’re erasing every piece of our cultural history, and it’s not all for the children,’’ said Lyons. ``It’s for Sandy Weill events.’’

Weill and his wife, Joan, have pledged $25 million toward the project, which includes a lavish rooftop terrace with a nearby dining area accessible by a glass elevator, to be named after the couple, according to a confidential legal document obtained by the AP. It’s signed by Weill, his wife and Gillinson.

The rooftop plans in particular have drawn strong opposition. Preservation advocate Christabel Gough of the Society for the Architecture of the City told the Landmarks Restoration Commission last year that the towers’ roofscape ``should be sacrosanct under the landmarks law.’’

But Carnegie Hall Corp. won commission approval for plans that preserve little inside the two structures. The landmarks commissioners are appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an ex-officio member of Carnegie’s board. The city and the state have committed $50 million in taxpayer money for the project, with another $56 million coming from a Carnegie Hall bond sale.

``The main motivation is to create a music education center where we can work with schoolchildren and talented artists,’’ Gillinson told the AP. He said the 60,000 square feet (5,600 square meters) of studios will now be available for programs run by the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, in partnership with the city’s Department of Education and The Juilliard School. They will teach music to urban children and, by computer and satellite, to youngsters around the globe.

``This will benefit tens of thousands of people and upset a small number of people, a very small number of people,’’ Gillinson said. ``Of course I’m sorry, and of course I’m upset, and of course we’ve looked after the people.’’
View of the Carnegie Hall Studios
Sherman with photo of Leonard Bernstein

Corning's Ultra Thin & Strong Gorilla Glass

Promises Big Profits

By BEN DOBBIN

Corning, NY (AP) An ultra-strong glass that has been looking for a purpose since its invention in 1962 is poised to become a multibillion-dollar bonanza for Corning Inc.

The 159-year-old glass pioneer is ramping up production of what it calls Gorilla glass, expecting it to be the hot new face of touch-screen tablets and high-end TVs.

Gorilla showed early promise in the ‘60s, but failed to find a commercial use, so it’s been biding its time in a hilltop research lab for almost a half-century. It picked up its first customer in 2008 and has quickly become a $170 million a year business as a protective layer over the screens of 40 million-plus cell phones and other mobile devices.

Now, the latest trend in TVs could catapult it to a billion-dollar business: Frameless flat-screens that could be mistaken for chic glass artwork on a living-room wall.

Because Gorilla is very hard to break, dent or scratch, Corning is betting it will be the glass of choice as TV-set manufacturers dispense with protective rims or bezels for their sets, in search of an elegant look.

Gorilla is two to three times stronger than chemically strengthened versions of ordinary soda-lime glass, even when just half as thick, company scientists say. Its strength also means Gorilla can be thinner than a dime, saving on weight and shipping costs.

Corning is in talks with Asian manufacturers to bring Gorilla to the TV market in early 2011 and expects to land its first deal this fall. With production going full-tilt in Harrodsburg, Ky., it is converting part of a second factory in Shizuoka, Japan, to fill a potential burst of orders by year-end.

``That’ll tell you something about our confidence in this,’’ said Corning President Peter Volanakis.

Investors are taking notice. In June, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York raised Corning’s projected share price, predicting Gorilla would be its second biggest business by 2015.

``There’s a wide range of views on how successful this product will be,’’ said Deutsche Bank analyst Carter Shoop. ``But I think it’s safe to say that, in aggregate, people are becoming much more bullish. It’s a tremendous opportunity. We’ll have to see how consumers react.’’

DisplaySearch market analyst Paul Gagnon said alternatives ``obviously scratch easier, they’re thicker and heavier, but they’re also cheaper.’’ He estimates that a sheet of Gorilla would add $30 to $60 to the cost of a set.

It remains to be seen ``whether this becomes a hit trend that propagates to other models and sizes or remains in the confines of a premium step-up series of products,’’ Gagnon said.

``This is a fashion trend, not a functional trend, and that’s what makes (the growth rate) very hard to predict,’’ said Volanakis. ``But because the market is so large in terms of number of TVs _ and the amount of glass per TV is so large _ that’s what can move the needle pretty quickly.’’

Based in western New York, Corning is the world’s largest maker of glass for liquid-crystal-display computers and TVs. High-margin LCD glass generated the bulk of Corning’s $5.4 billion in 2009 sales.

By ramping up volume production quickly in a budding market, Corning is pursuing a well-worn strategy designed to keep rivals from gaining ground. Its patience is also well practiced. Executives know too well the gulf between inspiration and application is sometimes decades-wide.

Corning set out in the late 1950s to find a glass as strong as steel. Dubbed Project Muscle, the effort combined heating and layering experiments and produced a robust yet bendable material called Chemcor.

Then in 1964, Corning devised an ingenious method called ``fusion draw’’ to make super-thin, unvaryingly flat glass. It pumped hot glass into a suspended trough and allowed it to overflow and run down either side. The glass flows then meet under the trough and fuse seamlessly into a smooth, hanging sheet of glass.

To make Chemcor, Corning ran the sheets through a ``tempering’’ process that set up internal stresses in the material. The same principle is behind the toughness of Pyrex glass, but Chemcor was tempered in a chemical bath, not by heat treatment.

Corning thought Chemcor sheets created this way would be the material of choice in car windshields, but British rival Pilkington Bros. intervened with a far cheaper mass-production approach. And another Chemcor adaptation in photochromic sunglasses also fizzled in the retail market.

Fusion draw finally proved its commercial value when Japanese electronics companies, looking for slim sheets free of alkalis that contaminate liquid crystals, turned to Corning’s soda-lime LCD glass in the 1980s. Corning rapidly turned into the world’s biggest supplier of LCD glass for laptops and that business blossomed around 2003 when LCD technology migrated to TVs.

In 2006, when demand surfaced for a cell phone cover glass, Corning dug out Chemcor from its database, tweaked it for manufacturing in LCD tanks, and renamed it Gorilla. ``Initially, we were telling ourselves a $10 million business,’’ said researcher Ron Stewart.

With relatively low startup costs, Gorilla should generate its first profit this year.

Since the Civil War, Corning has turned out a glittering array of innovations from railroad signals to Pyrex and auto-pollution filters to optical fiber. Allotting 10 percent of revenue to research keeps promising projects brewing at its Sullivan Park research hub on Corning’s hilly outskirts.

Optical fiber is another example of an invention that took a long time to come into its own. In 1934, chemist Frank Hyde came up with a practical method of making fused silica, an exceptionally pure glass, in bulk, yet it wasn’t put to use as optical fiber until the 1970s. Once there, it helped create the Internet revolution.

In his office lobby, Steiner showed off a 400-foot-long spool of flexible, 16-inch-wide glass that’s as thin as a sheet of paper. ``Kind of like Chemcor was back in the ‘60s,’’ he said. ``We’re not sure what we’re going to do with it, but it’s cool, isn’t it?’’