Man Standing In His Garden, 1942.

Something I have taken for granted these past months while scanning hundreds upon hundreds of slides each day is the fact that many people think of America in the 1950s and 1940s as being in black and white. Kodachrome gives the lie to that assumption and shows what we did, of course, know. We know that life was in color before color television and color movies, but how often do we see or pay much mind to real-life color images from the 1940s?

This slide is dated 1942. At 67 years old this is the oldest slide in my collection.

A friend recently made an interesting point about slides. He said that slides differ from prints because “that piece of film was there.” The scrap of film used for a Kodachrome slide was actually there where the picture was taken.

That’s kinda cool.