From the Archives: Karachi, Pakistan, 1961-1962

In 1961, my parents and I lived in Karachi, West Pakistan. I added "West" because that was before East and West Pakistan split into two separate countries (Pakistan and Bangladesh). My dad was working for an engineering company that was designing drinking water supply for the Karachi area. 

Karachi was a difficult time for the family. The city was primitive and dirty. Food standards were low. Prices for a western lifestyle were unexpectedly high. My dad rented an apartment, but the price was well above the housing allowance provided by the company. I recall the apartment and yard were OK, but the municipal electricity was sporadic. We could not drink tap water. 

I attended part of third grade at the Karachi American School (it had a different name then). The school is still in business with an international faculty. We sang the Pakistan national anthem every morning.

The expatriate (expat) community was active, and we associated with other Americans and Europeans. As was common among expat communities, we bought furniture and household goods from other foreigners who were leaving for other assignments. That included buying and selling LP records (that seemed to be a big deal, according to my dad's diary). The American ambassador projected movies on a screen on his rooftop. We used to visit our friends, who lived in an adjacent house, and sit on their roof to watch the ambassador's films. The sound was a bit muted, but we could hear. 

Here are some street scenes from the city. Unfortunately, my dad did not label the slide mounts with date or exact location. Please click any picture to see it enlarged.

 

Home 

 

Couch transportation device, Feb. 2, 1962

Moving day, Jan. 22, 1962

The black Chevrolet was a company car. A black car without air conditioning in Karachi? It might have been a bit more convenient than the camel. 

 Unfortunately, I could not find any photos from inside the apartment.  

 

Downtown 

 

Kandawala Building, Bunder Road, Karachi. It housed offices of the US Embassy and US AID.

Professional letter or document writers

I have seen letter writers like this in other countries. For people who could not write or did not have paper or a writing situation where they lived, the professional scribes provided a vital service. 

 

Vital shaving service

Saddar District 

Jahangir Park (possibly) with the Empress Market in the background

 According to the current internet, Jahangir Park is now walled and has dinosaurs in it. 

 

Empress Market, Saddar district

The bustling Empress Market in the Saddar area was built between 1884 and 1889 during the British Raj. I do not remember visiting markets, but I assume we explored. This may have been similar to Scott Market in Rangoon, also a major mrket from the era of the British Raj.  

 

My dad and I liked busy markets like this, my mom less so. But this looks pretty clean, so maybe she would have been reasonably comfortable looking around.  

 

City Outskirts 

 

The outskirts of the city had miles of shanties and huts. Local people, often children, collected camel and cow dung to dry in the sun. They sold these patties for fuel. 

End of the road - somewhere

Sailing boat excursion somewhere on Hawke's Bay

Looking at these slides brought back memories of another time, another life. I would love to go back and explore, but the political and security situation of the 2026 world makes a trip to Karachi unlikely, especially for US citizens.  

My dad took these pictures on Ektachrome slide film with his Leica IIIC camera with 5cm ƒ/2 Summitar lens. I scanned the slides with a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED film scanner controlled by NikonScan 4.03 software. The slides had changed color to red, but the auto color function in Photoshop Elements 2024 did a remarkable job at retrieving some original color. 

 

Karachi and the Indus River valley (from Google Maps)

Salvaging Faded Ektachrome Slides

1957 Ektachrome booklet (courtesy of Mr. Maurice Fisher at Photographic Memorabilia)

Eastman Kodak introduced Ektachrome transparency film in sheet film format in 1946. The big advantage of Ektachrome over the famous Kodachrome was the former could be developed at local laboratories or even at home. In Ektachrome, the color couplers were included in the emulsion and processing required only one color developer. Kodachrome required a major laboratory operation for developing, and this meant a turnaround time of several days for most users. 

The Ektachrome film that my dad used in 1959 would have required the E-2 Process or the Improved E-2 Process. The film speed was probably 32 ASA. His slide mounts have the same blue pattern as the example on the cover of the Kodak booklet. The text on his slide mounts is in English, but I do not know where he had them processed. Were there color photo labs in Rangoon at the time?

The big failing of early Ektachrome was that colors faded. Most 1950s and 1960s Ektachrome slides are now a red mess. Image data is there, but much of the color information has been lost. In the days before Photoshop or other sophisticated software packages, there was not much you could do with one of these faded slides. I threw out hundreds of family slides decades ago when my wife and I sorted my dad's archives. 

Let us look at one example from Rangoon, Burma, from 1958 or 1959. I scanned the slide on a Plustek 7600i film scanner using Silverfast software via a Mac mini computer with the BigSur 11.7.4 operating system. The original slide shows the characteristic red color shift. You see the same with Anscochrome slides from the 1960s. 

Standing on a furniture box that came from Hong Kong

This is the scan on "Auto" mode as a 48-bit TIFF file (16 bits for each color). There does not appear to be much useful color data left. (I have resized for this article but not changed color).

This is the "Portrait" mode in Silverfast. I am amazed how well it did with no more intervention on my part. The software is doing some clever work in the background.

This is a 16 bit monochrome scan. This does not look too bad and demonstrates that there is still image data on this media. In another 64 years, will there be retrievable image data on our digital storage media or on our accounts in the "cloud"? Sorry I keep asking this, but you readers know the answer.

Photoshop's automatic color correction tool did not work well on a slide this badly shifted. The grey dropper also did not work. On the Photrio forum, experienced Photoshop users said the best way to correct a faded slide was to use the curves tool manually. I moved the curve to the extents of the color data and adjusted the amplitude. The example above is or the blue channel. I am far from a sophisticated Photoshop user but did the best I could in CS5. The result is slightly different than the Silverfast "Portrait" scan, neither better or worse. 

Summary:  There is some recoverable color data in old faded Ektachrome slides. And a conversion to monochrome can look surprisingly good. Maybe future software will be more sophisticated, but I have not seen many (or any?) new scanners in the last decade. But we can always hope for software development.