Some wonderful Kodachrome portraits from 1959

I was sorting through one of the boxes of slides from the huge collection recently donated to the Found Film project, when I found a small unmarked box which contained amongst other images, the wonderful portraits shown in this post.

The box was unusual in having no marking on it to indicate where the slides were taken – the majority of the boxes in the donation have labels to say the country the photos were taken in and the year they were shot. This box, in contrast, is just an unmarked, compact slide holder with 300 tightly packed slides inside.

Because the slides are all Kodachrome they have a couple of advantages over other colour slide film; first the processing date stamped on the cardboard mount, and secondly the images have retained the colour and definition that they had when they were first processed all those years ago.

Kodachrome portraits from 1959.

The portraits are shown below.

Because they look so good I used a slightly different process for scanning them that I normally use. Instead of scanning them as jpeg and uploading to the site, I actually scanned these as tiff images and imported them into Lightroom to give them some proper post processing before I exported them as jpeg.

Using Lightroom I checked the exposure in a couple of the shots and set the clarity up a bit to give the images a bit more ‘punch’.

As well as the superb colour rendition I think the shots are very well composed, in most cases following the rule of not placing the subject in the centre of the image, and also seem to have been ‘posed’ to give the look required at the time. This is particularly true of the image of the woman reading her book on the beach and gazing into the distance; what a super shot that is – and it screams 1950s to me.