Kodachrome: The American Invention of Our World, 1939-1959

A popular history of 20th-century visual culture, Kodachrome: The American Invention of Our World 1939-1959 shows how the American point of view in full-color became an international standard.

The book opens with a selection of rarely reproduced color images from the Depression through the early days of World War II. The bright, cosmopolitan atmosphere of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York contrasts with a foreboding glimpse of Hitler’s pre-war Berlin. Early photographs of the devastation in Warsaw and London are presented together with pictures of sharecroppers and homesteaders in the United States.

Fashion plates and candid portraits of Satchmo, Frida Kahlo and Helena Rubenstein share the pages that follow with coverage of the War through the liberation of Buchenwald, the conference at Yalta, and the wreckage of Berlin and Hiroshima.

The book continues through the late 40s and into the 50s with a wide-ranging assortment of images from the worlds of fashion, politics, sports, and popular culture. Among the personalities, places, and events pictured are Marilyn Monroe, Joe Di Maggio, Gene Autry, Elvis, Pablo Picasso, Eero Saarinen’s studio, shop windows in Manhattan, the Korean War, and the A-bomb tests at the Marshall Islands and Bikini Atoll.

Before dedicating her career to editing and preserving photographic images, Els Rijper worked as an actress and modern dancer in Europe and the United States. Her efforts on behalf of the Bettmann and UPI photographic archives have resulted in a comprehensive Preservation Plan that will protect millions of negatives, transparencies, and photographs for centuries without hindering access for reproduction and scanning. Kodachrome: The American Invention of Our World 1939-1959 is her first book.