Company History
FRAMINGHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, 1956 — Elliot Korklan, a local photographer, had a problem – he had grown tired of waiting for his prints. Rather than sending them out and waiting, he decided he could do it better himself. And that’s exactly what he did. In the basement of a house on Proctor Street, he opened Industrial Color Laboratory.
It wasn’t long before other local photographers began bringing their film to Elliot’s lab for developing, contact sheets, and high-quality prints. Around that same time, color photography was revolutionizing the way the world looked at pictures. It was at that time that Elliot made an important decision. He didn’t want to be the biggest, just the best.
This philosophy carried Industrial Color through the 60’s and the 70’s, but the demand for his high-quality printing continued to increase. By 1980, Elliot realized the time was right to sell off the photography side of his business in order that he could focus on his core product: high-quality developing and printing.
By 1986, Mr. Korklan decided that the time had come to retire, and he sold Industrial Color Laboratory to Larry Capodilupo. What Larry bought was a company in transition. The small, custom 8×10 prints that had been ICL’s mainstay were being replaced in demand with larger images for use in trade show booths and museum exhibits.
These more specialized images required mounting to substrates, and so ICL had a second location just down the street. In an aluminum building without heat and with a hand-cranked mounting machine, ICL began affixing prints to foamcore, gatorfoam, plexiglass and masonite. It didn’t take long to realize that ICL had outgrown its configuration.
In 1988, Mr. Capodilupo moved the company to a new 8,800 square foot facility. Within a few years ICL acquired its first digital imaging devices, a Solitaire film recorder, a Howtek scanner, a couple of Mac Quadra 950’s, and a Xerox electrostatic printer. The industry changed virtually overnight.
