Photographs, clockwise: Bettman/Corbis; Bettman/Corbis; Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Chris Hondros/Getty Images; Alex Lentati/Evening Standard/Rex Features; David Duprey/AP; Gary Cameron/Reuters
Above, extracts from a gallery compiled by our fantastic picture desk. Below, an emotional farewell to Kodak, written by The Guardian’s head of photography, Roger Tooth:
I’ve wanted to write something about the imminent demise of Kodak since rumours about their bankruptcy started circulating a couple of months ago. But it wasn’t until I caught a repeat of British fashion photographer Rankin’s TV programme about Time magazine’s veteran photojournalists that something really caught my eye, taking me back to my early experience of being a photographer. It brought home what Kodak meant to me.
The documentary includes a clip of an old BBC Omnibus film about the great war photographer and Life staffer Larry Burrows, who returned time and again to Vietnam to document the war, and eventually died there. Here he was, I guess early in the morning, getting ready to go out for the day, sitting and talking about his experiences to the film crew while opening box after box of Kodak film. He was taking out those lovely, tiny, dome-topped tin canisters and chucking the boxes at his feet until it formed a veritable pile of discarded cardboard.
I guess I should say something about Kodak filing Chapter 11. Kodak walked out in Rochester a long time ago… The company executives have made many missteps over the years that have lead to this bankruptcy. They bet on a lot of products that just didn’t pan out. They could not keep one step ahead of the game.
This death rattle affords us all the opportunity to be nostalgic and lament the death of a great american company. But for those of us who have had a front row seat to this execution… today’s filing was inevitable.
