We’ve Got Bigger Problems: Preservation during Eastman Color’s Innovation and Early Diffusion

This article considers how the development and early uses of Eastman Color technology shaped its stability. Drawing on primary sources, including documents held in the Eastman Kodak Collection at Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester, trade press accounts, and Kodak veteran John Waner’s personal memoir of Eastman Color in the 1940s and 1950s, I show how and why the innovators of monopack color so often subordinated preservation to other considerations. In so doing, I also hope to resuscitate some of Vittum’s original awe at these technologies now that they face extinction with the rise of digital formats