A hundred years didn’t just loosen the dress code.
It handed one man the right to be looked at without apologizing for it — and left everyone else in the frame standing exactly as their century allowed.
Kodachrome is the word for the contemporary man. Brighter, sharper, more intense, more colorful, perhaps even happier?
100 years have marked great progress toward the liberation of the human body and spirit, a liberation that some want to restrict by returning to a romanticized notion of the good old days.
Harsh as it may seem, the good old days were not that good, at least not worth what we would have to lose to return there.
Nostalgia is a kind of Kodachrome, brightening a past that was, for anyone who did not fit its frame, considerably dimmer than memory prefers to admit. The figure standing at the center of this piece is not asking to go back. He is positive proof of what was gained by not going back.
— Behan
