Colorama: monumental photographic canvases 1950-1990

Colorama is a huge photographic display that was located on the east balcony of Grand Central Terminal in New York from 1950 to 1990. Used as an advertisement for Eastman Kodak. Under a transparent backlit screen were the largest photographs in the world, 18 feet (almost 6 meters) high and 60 feet (about 20 meters) wide! (All photos in this issue are clickable)

(Total 16 photos)

Kodak introduced these phantasmagoric photographs in the 1950s and displayed 565 such photographs in Grand Central Station over the course of 40 years. Colorful panoramas often showed impossibly happy people in the most beautiful corners of the earth. No doubt the aim was to reinforce the idea that travelers should document the fleeting moments of life. Naturally, with a Kodak camera.

"The world's largest photographs," these panoramic prints were a surprisingly complex technical process. Each print required an entire team of Kodak experts, a variety of large-format cameras were used to create the images, and in the early years, wet 6-meter transparencies were dried overnight in the swimming pool of a Kodak employee recreation center.

Initially, these ideal utopian unrealistically beautiful photographs of perfect quality and insane resolution advertised mainly the American way of life, but later, stories from other countries began to appear.

1. 1961 Ansel Adams harvesting wheat near Pendleton, Oregon.

2. 1961 Teen dances.

3. 1968 Herbert Archer, Cabin and Canoe on Saddleback Lake, Maine.

4. 1968 Peter Gales, Teenage cyclists on the beach of the Monterey Peninsula, California.

5. 1966 Autumn scene at Placid Lake, New York.

6. 1977 Sunrise over Rio de Janeiro.

7. 1976 Brazilian model on Ipanema beach, Rio de Janeiro.

8. 1981 Capitol, Washington.

9. 1983 The Richardson Canal House, New York.

10. 1957 "Closing the Summer Cottage". Another name for the photograph is "The American Dream", by Ralph Amdursky and Charles Baker.

11. 1966 Pirate bay. Paradise Island, Nassau, Bahamas, Hank Mayer.

12. 1968 Yosemite National Park, California, Peter Gales.

13. Rest on the lake, Colorama.

14. 1967 Train at Hugh Taylor Birch Park, Hank Mayer, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

15. 1968 Water skiing, Hank Mayer, Cypress Gardens, Florida.

16. 1964 "Cowboys in Grand Teton," H. Archer and J. Hood, Grand Teton, Wyoming.

17. And this is how colorama photos looked at Grand Central Station in New York.