Scanning Around With Gene: Yosemite, Kodachrome, and Curt Teich

Gene Gable

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Today’s column incorporates a number of my favorite things. First, there’s Yosemite, the great National Park in California that pretty much defines the term “stunning landscape.” Then there’s Curt Teich, the long-time Chicago printer responsible for so many post cards and promotional images of places near and far. And then there’s Kodachrome, the film emulsion that set the standard for color reproduction for a number of decades. They all came together in the form of a 1940s “memory book” which I recently found at a local thrift shop.

I’ve written before about Teich, most famous for those “greetings from,” “big letter” postcards you’ve seen forever, and Kodachrome, the film and processing technology from Kodak that set a new standard for color fidelity when it first appeared in the 1930s. So when I found a booklet of Kodachrome color images of famous Yosemite sites, reproduced by Teich and distributed by the Western Publishing and Novelty Company in Los Angeles, I just had to pick it up and throw it on the scanner. The booklet isn’t dated, but judging from the automobiles pictured, I’d say it’s late 40s or very early 50s. Click on any image for a lager version – this first one is not from the booklet, but is from the Teich series of big-letter post cards and serves as a good introduction to the photographs.

Yosemite, of course, needs little in the way of introduction – we’ve all either been there or seen plenty of pictures, most famously the black-and-white images of Ansel Adams. But at the time of this booklet, color photography was becoming all the rage and Kodachrome was considered the gold standard.

Teich had a number of printing processes that it employed in its products, including a couple of proprietary ones – the exact method used for this booklet is not credited, but it does a decent job of reproducing accurate colors for the era.

Curt Teich (1877-1974) was a German immigrant to the United States who built a small printing empire focused primarily on color post cards, many of them hand-tinted back in the days before color lithography became widespread. But in addition to post cards, Teich did many color memory books like the one these images are from, along with other commercial printing.

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