Thursday, September 12, 2019

Neil Montanus, Legendary Kodak Colorama Photographer Who Shot Walt Disney Most Famous Corporate Picture Dies at 92

Neil Montanus, the legendary Kodak Colorama photographer who shot Walt Disney most famous corporate picture Died at 92. The New York Times has posted a tribute article to Neil, here are some excerpts below and you can read the full NYT article HERE.

For four decades the Eastman Kodak Company occupied some of the most valuable advertising real estate in America: the vast wall above the east balcony in Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. Every weekday, 650,000 commuters and visitors who jostled through the main concourse could gaze up at Kodak’s Coloramas, the giant photographs that measured 18 feet high and 60 feet wide, each backlit by a mile of cold cathode tubing, displaying idealized visions of postwar family life — not to mention the wonders of color film.

Happy families in bucolic settings, scuba divers in magical waters, and skiers amid majestic mountains floated above the harried and tired office workers who slogged to and from their trains. Over 40 years, Kodak displayed 565 Coloramas in Grand Central, inserting new ones every few weeks. The photographer responsible for more Coloramas than anyone else — 55 of them — was Neil Montanus, an athletic adventure-seeker whose photographic exploits included embedding himself with a onetime headhunting tribe in Borneo and leaping out of a Land Rover in Kenya to capture the image of a snarling cheetah face to face.

With a camera, he could do it all. He advanced the art of underwater photography and was known for his pictures of exotic locales. He also specialized in shots of dancers and nude models. He was especially skilled at portraiture. His portrait of Walt Disney, who flew in 1961 to Kodak headquarters in Rochester to pose for Mr. Montanus, was called by Disney executives the best ever taken of him - picture on top.

But the highlight of Neil Montanus career was shooting the Coloramas, one of the biggest, boldest and longest-running ad campaigns in American corporate history. Noted photographers like Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter took pictures for them, and Norman Rockwell staged at least one. But Mr. Montanus, starting in 1960, was one of Kodak’s go-to Colorama photographers. “It was the great experience of his life, and he loved doing it,” said Alison Nordstrom, the former curator at the George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum) in Rochester. “The Colorama photographers were heroes in Kodaktown.”

After the grim years of World War II, Mr. Montanus’s photographs evoked the aspirational life that Kodak encouraged families to capture on their own with color film: a mother taking pictures of Christmas carolers through a frosted window; clean-cut teenagers dancing in a sock hop in the basement rec room; couples enjoying the fall foliage in Vermont.

The Colorama campaign promoted photography as an activity in itself. Wherever the scenes were set — in a sweeping vista out West, at a lakeside cabin in the Adirondacks, at a trendy disco in New York City — someone in the picture was taking a picture of the picture, making the Coloramas meta before meta became a thing.

The campaign also promoted the American dream, or at least a gauzy version of it, with cheerful white nuclear families in the suburbs documenting their lives with cameras and going for those “Kodak moments.”

Mr. Montanus embraced it all, thriving as the leading Colorama photographer in Kodak’s heyday. “He was Mr. Kodak,” Dr. Nordstrom said. “His death is the end of an era. His story and Kodak’s story were pretty much intertwined.”

Here is a selection of Kodak Colorama pictures, some shot by Neil Montanus, others not. The Colorama colors were really amazing, kind of Technicolor for still images,

Below, a Montanus Colorama photo with - guess what - the real Matterhorn in the background! Mr. Montanus shot 55 of the 565 Grand Central Coloramas, more than any other photographer.

Another of Mr. Montanus’s Colorama photographs, this one depicting a scene at Lake Placid, in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, from 1966.

Wherever a Colorama scene was set, someone in the picture was taking a picture of the picture. This image is from December 1961.

A Colorama image in New York Grand Central Terminal by Mr. Montanus in 1989, the year before the Colorama campaign ended. The Grand Central Apple Store is now where the Colorama display was.

Back when Epcot opened, Kodak Colorama Photographer came and shot this sunset picture of the Journey into Imagination pavilion designed by Imagineers Tony Baxter and Tom Morris, and the picture was displayed at Grand Central from Nov 29 to Dec 20. Tony Baxter went to New York to see the picture in Grand Central!

More great Colorama pictures!

Some Colorama pictures were shot around the world, too. Below Colorama pictures shot in India, Portugal, Brazil and Guam.

Some Colorama pics were never displayed at Grand Central, like some of the above pics and the ones below, probably considered too "hot" for New York travellers passing by!