On November 18, Paige Sarlin joined 100 others at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, to give the Kodak Carousel slide projector a proper send-off to the great darkened family room in the sky. The last of the trusty machines, which had been in continuous production since 1961, shuttled off the assembly line on October 22, 2004, deemed obsolete by Kodak brass in an audiovisual future dominated by digital cameras and PowerPoint.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A self-described slide geek, Sarlin was working on a series of slide-based performance pieces when someone forwarded her Kodak’s November 2003 announcement that production of all the company’s slide projectors, including the Carousel and the higher-end Ektagraphic, Ektalite, and Ektapro models, would end the following year. At the time, she says, “I really wanted to turn the whole world on to think about the medium of the slide show. I was feeling a little evangelical. . . . So I get this announcement and I’m like, holy cow, here it is–this is ending. And I thought: how often is it that we get to picture an actual ending?”
She wrote to Kodak asking for permission to film the last day of production in Rochester, and soon struck up a correspondence with Merri-Lou McKeever, the general manager of the slide projector business, peppering her with questions about the product’s manufacturing history. As she slowly learned more–that, for example, the production of many parts had been outsourced to China, and that Kodak’s entire slide projector output was now controlled by just six managers and ten assembly workers in Rochester and Stuttgart, Germany–she started to think she might be onto something great. “It’s not just a story about the shift from analog to digital,” she says. “It’s a story about the change in manufacturing, about the impact of outsourcing on the industry, and on this entire area of the northeast.”
To Sarlin, whose father worked in advertising and whose grandfather was an avid Carousel user, the story of the slide projector is as much about the construction of memory and community as it is about the globalization of industry and the relentless march of technology. “Unlike a page of an album that can be turned quickly with little distraction,” she said in her speech at the Eastman House, “a slide show image is hard to escape or live down. Often quite embarrassing and funny, these slides are now as imperfect and human as we are. Scratched and dirty, flawed and fading like our memories. But slide projectors don’t just offer pictures of past moments; they create experiences as well. The experience of watching these images dissolve into others in the company of family and friends and strangers who become friends is as memorable as the images.”
Info: 773-329-0899, www.hideoutchicago.com
