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LAST OF THE LABS: A Final Stop at the Philly's Finest Photo Fixers
by Ben Tiven
March 2005
Professional Color, a photographic services lab, had occupied an unassuming white brick building at the corner of Seventh and Ranstead streets, since May of 1957. With their knowledgeable staff, consistent film processing and devotion to customer service, the lab—known to its customers as Pro-Color—had built up a small but loyal following among Philadelphia's professional photographers.
Just before Christmas, Pro-Color's owner Charles P. Mills Jr., known to most as ‘Bud', wrote his customers a short letter. “It is with great distress and sadness that I write to tell you that Pro-Color will cease operations on December 30th,” the letter said. “Although we have an excellent staff who have worked very hard to give you the professional results that you require, our sales indicate that most of you have a much smaller need for our photographic lab services ... please accept our best wishes for your future.” Mills may not have realized that his lab was not just a vendor to its customers, but an institution. The orange Naugahyde chairs, the giant brown punch-card machine, the Addressograph stamping contraption—these had always made it seem as though the forward march of time had bypassed Pro-Color, that it would go on running film indefinitely. But in fact, the very nature of photography was changing. Digital photography requires expertise in computers and software, not in chemistry and film processing machines. After years of declining demand and with its suppliers steadily discontinuing production of much of its stock, the lab finally had little choice but to close its doors.
Pro-Color was founded to be the processing and production arm of Chas P. Mills Photography, a massive commercial studio employing dozens of staff photographers and servicing a wide gamut of photographic needs—jewelry catalogs, architectural work, automobile advertisements, corporate headshots, you name it. The studio was on the first floor, the lab built into the basement. In 1965, Bud Mills took over the lab, and over the next few years its reach expanded to serve more than just the in-house needs of the family business. By 1980, Chas Sr. had passed away and his photography studio had closed down, but Pro-Color's processing services were in high gear. Bud—always calm, quiet, and pleasant, always in dark slacks and cardigan sweater vest—was at the lab every day, knew every customer, and took care of every problem for forty years.
Consistent film processing is crucial to commercial photography. A given film will yield different colors or densities under different processing conditions, a problem that commercial photographers have always labored to overcome. Bud gave me a tour of the facilities and explained the pains they had taken to ensure repeatable standards in their work. “See this Refrema film processor?” he said, pointing at a brown metal door that enclosed a chamber with racks of filmstrips being dried with hot air after development, like the last phase of the gas-station car wash. “It's the only one in Philadelphia. We always worked closely with the manufacturer to maintain it, and with Kodak and Fuji too, to make sure our densities are always right.”
Jim Abbott, a Philadelphia photographer and longtime Pro-Color customer, explained that the consistent quality was due in large part to the high standards of the employees and their longevity with the company. “Pro-Color is like the last lab in the country where you actually talked to the technicians who did the processing work. Other labs have no consistency...what's gone now is the personal involvement.” Bud hired his employees locally and gave them long-term training; many stayed on for decades, some for thirty-five or forty years. Bob Asman, another twenty-five-year customer and friend of Bud's, added, “They had an ingredient that today's labor force is missing. They cared about what they did. To some extent, they put the work in front of the money.”
The Refrema was a modern machine, one a few in the lab. But walking through the Pro-Color basement was, in other ways, a trip through photography's late-Mesozoic: an 8x10 Deardorf copy camera in continuous operation since its 1957 installation; another process-camera with a rear-loading, vacuum suction film back, which looked like a small bank vault; huge old 8x10 color enlargers mounted in Fotar frames so sturdy you could stand on them. The tables in the main work area were a mess with spot-tone inks, the air smelled funny with chemicals, strips of film and the coils of compressed-air cables hung from every hook and ledge. The whole basement was divided into a maze of about ten individual darkrooms and assorted sub-darkrooms, each outfitted with specific projection and process equipment. On the walls of these small, two-man workstations were hundreds of hand-drawn charts detailing the precise interrelationships of time, light, exposure density and color balance for dozens of different films, some that hadn't been produced in years. Really, Pro-Color knew more about Kodak films than Kodak does, because they had worked with them so intimately for years. With the passing of this lab and the scattering of its core employees, decades of accumulated knowledge about photography will disappear.
Digital photography eliminated film, the intermediary between the camera and the final printed piece. The Macintosh-Epson-Adobe revolution put a shiny little frosted-white photo lab on the desk of every art director, magazine editor, advertising agency, print shop, and photographer in the land, and made archaic the specialized services labs like Pro-Color offered. While in some ways this change has been empowering for small businesses in the commercial art world, Abbott explains some of the downsides to this new scenario, for photographers and their clients: “Digital makes photographers into production houses; after they're done taking the picture, they have to edit, retouch, resize, and color balance all the images, which is many hours of extra, tedious, work. And clients have no idea the kind of quality they used to have with film on the production end ... now, when making a brochure, say, they just send out some office employee with cheap digital camera and use those images.”
I first found out about Pro-Color by asking another photographer, just like everybody else. The lab did little advertising; they have not a single line in the Yellow Pages, though you could find them in the White if you already knew their name. The ease of dealing with the people there—it really can't be overstated how reassuring it was to talk to people who knew what you were talking about and how certain you would feel when you left your film with them. I was an occasional assistant to some local photographers; the first time I was there Bud gave me a discount, and I never took film elsewhere.
I moved away from Philadelphia about four months ago. I was recently back in town for a week when I heard that Pro-Color was going to close. I went over to say goodbye to Bud and get a few last sheets of film processed. When I approached him about writing this article, asking him if he would take some time in his last week at work to talk with me, he shrugged.
“Sure. How about tomorrow when you come back to pick up your film.”
I came back the next day and we sat down in the conference room upstairs. Bud read from a piece of scrap paper on which he'd written a rough outline of the lab's history: when it started, what it did, when he took over the business,. After he finished, we talked a little about digital and how the lab had dealt with it the last few years, and then he gave me a tour of the basement. When it was done, I said thanks and started writing some quick notes. By the time I looked up to ask one last thing, Bud already had his clipboard in hand, working on the paperwork for those final runs of film.
Ben Tiven is Associate Editor at THE INDEPENDENT. He lives in Boston.
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