Guy Stricherz (b. 1948) is a printmaker, editor and artist currently living in Washington State.
"Americans in Kodachrome is a photographic portrait of ordinary Americans during that mythical time between the war that we won and the one that we lost, when everything seemed possible until we found it was not. Gathered from across the country for the creation of a self portrait of, by, and for the people, these pictures form a democracy in Technicolor. Each image is a mystery with a private meaning unknown to us, yet each holds a truth common to us all."
Guy Stricherz, July 4, 2002. New York City.
A phenomenal testimony to an often idealized memory of postwar democracy, Americans In Kodachrome is an assembly of the nostalgic, conceptualized and brought to fruition by renowned conceptual artist, photographer, and printer, Guy Stricherz. Once considered his family’s own personal historian, Stricherz is now the adopted chronicler for the visual memoirs of hundreds of ordinary Americans. His open call for family photos shot on Kodachrome slides which appeared in small town papers in the early 1980’s was met by an onslaught of 500,000 submissions from more than 500 collections from coast to coast. Over a seventeen year period, Stricherz has compiled, edited and made these personal histories into a series of prints that celebrate iconic American moments: the family with their first television, or standing proud in front of their first dream home, a young teenager waiting for her prom date in a strapless blue dress, a child unwrapping a new Barbie doll or posing with toy guns as the Cowboy Kid.
Characterized by their blunt honesty and universal appeal, the images have been transformed into relics of unmatched beauty and permanence by the extremely rare dye-transfer process. This labor-intensive method of printing yields the widest gamut of colors in photographic history and emanates with a luminosity akin to the original projected Kodachrome transparencies.