Steve McCurry had more reason than most photographers to be sad when Kodak announced that it was ceasing production of Kodachrome film last year. Few, if any, brands of film have left such an indelible mark on photographic history but, for McCurry, it was the subject of a personal devotion.

Over the past 30 years, the Magnum photographer has become something of a household name through his work for National Geographic and a string of books published by Phaidon (seven in nine years), collecting many of photojournalism's top prizes along the way, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal, which he won early in his career 30 years ago, and a Special Recognition from the United Nations International Photographic Council. But, in particular, it's his striking use of colour that he's best known for, and his singular iconic images - many of them shot on Kodachrome - such as his most famous image from 1984, "Afghan Girl". 

He has another 800,000 transparencies stored in his personal archive and, such was his love for its colours and tones, that, when he heard it was to be discontinued (BJP #7741), he approached Kodak with a personal request: to have the honour of securing the last roll of Kodachrome ever made. The company agreed and, 18 months on, the 36 images he took with it make for a unique tribute to the now extinct colour reversal film.

McCurry says he had no idea where he would use the film when he requested it, but he knew he wanted to revisit some of the most memorable locations he had shot with Kodachrome. He eventually settled on New York and India, where he found some particularly fitting subjects. "There was a nomadic tribe in India that I was particularly interested in," he says. "Their way of life is rapidly coming to an end due to the modern world that we live in. The idea of travelling and migrating, wandering and looking for pasture land, taking huge herds of sheep or goats or cattle or whatever - those days are coming to an end. I felt that, with this iconic film, this would be an appropriate subject. Kodachrome is disappearing, and this way of life is disappearing."

Film star Kodachrome has long had a special relationship with this kind of photojournalism. When a National Geographic Society expedition ventured into a hitherto unexplored region of Utah in 1948, for example, the images they took with the film were so remarkable they named it the Kodachrome Basin.

In his last work with the film, McCurry shot portraits of Rabari tribesmen whose wide, staring eyes and rich colour contrasts evoke his earlier work. But other images from the roll reveal a very different look and feel, bearing testament to the subtlety of the film. There is a portrait of Hollywood actor Robert De Niro in his personal screening room in Manhattan, a picture of McCurry's feet in front of a TV screen showing US satirist Stephen Colbert as he relaxes in a hotel room at 4am, a close-up of street art at the junction of New York's Seventh Avenue and Bleecker, and an image of Turkish photographer Ara Güler, who is nicknamed "The Eye of Istanbul".

McCurry used one Nikon F6 camera and (mostly) a single 50mm lens during the project, but says he also used a digital SLR to evaluate light and the composition thoroughly before every shot. Despite his love of the analogue materials he grew up with, he admits the vast majority of his work is now digital, and has been for the past five years. Like most of his fellow professionals, he says, the practical advantages of the new technology outweigh any nostalgia. "I think in some ways digital actually is superior to film," he says. "You can shoot in extremely low light, in almost complete darkness. That, for me, has been a great benefit. And, with film, if you were shooting indoors in artificial light, there was always a question about colour temperature and colour balance - a worry that, if you photographed inside, things would go yellow or green. With digital, you don't have that problem."

Nevertheless, he gives a glowing report of Kodachrome's benefits and says it had a profound effect on his style over the years. "With Kodachrome, what you saw with your eye was what you saw on the film," he says. "It was a really wonderful colour palette, which was true to what you had seen. Film manufacturers made film that was more vivid and with more heightened colours, but I always felt they were a little cartoonish. Kodachrome had a very beautiful, elegant tonal range.

"Most of my work is in colour, and I've developed a sensibility for colour, finding a certain balance and harmony that colour requires. There are a lot of difficulties with colour that you just don't have with black-and-white, which is mostly just a question of design and composition."

His very last picture was unplanned, but it provided an apt epitaph to the much-loved film. "I happened to be in Kansas taking the roll to be processed and had literally one exposure left," he says. "I ended up driving past this cemetery, and so I drove in and took the last picture there [below], which I thought was very symbolic."

Unlike Polaroid, which closed down the manufacture of its last instant film plant in 2008, only for production lines to re-open a year later under the ownership of The Impossible Project, Kodachrome will not make a comeback, because there's no longer anywhere to process it. The last lab to offer processing, Dwayne's Photo in Kansas, stopped the service on 30 December. "There's a very critical temperature equation that you have to be very precise about, and once they close this service, that's the end of the story," says McCurry. "The chances that they'll ever bring this back again are somewhere between remote and nil."

www.kodachromeproject.com