Last week a former Kodak engineer sent this picture of the recent destruction of Kodak's black and white paper coating facilities. We all knew that day would come, but we never imagined it would be so soon I have a small stash of Azo—enough to keep me working for a short while. Thankfully there are several smaller companies committed to continuing producing these materials. I even switched to Ilford films to insure that they would continue being made, and that I could trust their excellent quality control. Here is the email and picture as it arrived last week. It is somewhat ironic that this picture was made with technologies that helped Kodak justify putting an end to their production of B&W paper.

Sending you a panorama of Kodak Bld 50 that was imploded at 7 AM this morning. End of an era. This building is where B&W papers were made. The building to the right of this building is bld 57, currently under demolition, where B&W paper was sensitized. To the left of bld 50 was where paper roll storage Bld 16 used to be. Behind Bld 50 in this picture is where Bld 9 used to be, Paper Finishing, Bld 10 where I started at KP and Bld 36. Looks like a war zone up close. I photographed this about 3 hours after the destruction. Many old Paper Manufacturing alumni were coming by and we talked. Everyone had a glum face as they saw where they spent much of their lives... gone...

SAD!

© 2007 Dave Valvo www.Davevalvo.com

technical photo items:

Camera Canon 5D, 13MP digital SLR with Canon 24-105mm image stabilized L lens set at 50mm. A Jasper scanning head was used on a tripod Vertical images were collected Exposure was kept constant at 1/100 sec f/4.5 for all 7 images Panorama was stitched using Adobe Photoshop CS3 Original image is 90 MP. reduced to less than 1MP for easy emailing.