Color Photography in the 19th Century and Early 20th Century: Sciences, Technologies, Empires

"Unidentified color positives in Slovak collections - Research and challenges" by Kitti Baráthová   
The main purpose of the presentation is to introduce my doctoral research on different color positive processes on transparent supports regarding Slovak collections. The focus is on additive and subtractive color techniques on various bases, such as glass, cellulose film sheets or film roll. The urgency of this topic lies mainly in the fact that Slovak collections do not have identified and correctly categorised these valuable pieces in their depositories, which can lead to sudden deterioration under wrong storage conditions. Extensive research on this topic is constantly carried out in the world, but publications of international literature are mostly in English and only limited information is accessible in Slovakia, which is not widely available for all. The lack of professional literature and higher education of museum staff are few of the problems I am facing. As a conservator I realised that revision of the collections is necessary, because proper identification is the first step of preventive care, appropriate storage conditions and conservation of these rare color positives is extremely important for their future preservation.
 
Target audience: Conservators/restorators, archivists, curators, museum studies
 
 
Mgr. art. Kitti Baráthová is a photograph conservator based in Slovakia. She is a  Department of Restoration and Conservation graduate at the Academy of Fine Arts and  Design (AFAD) in Bratislava who specialises in paper and photograph conservation. Since  2019 she has assisted at teaching at the Department of Restoration at AFAD in the  Photograph Conservation Studio, lecturing courses such as Historical Photographic  Techniques - Theory and Practice. In 2022, she started her PhD studies under the  supervision of Associate Professor Mgr. art. Janka Blaško Križanová ArtD. Her research  focuses mainly on color photographs on transparent supports. As a PhD student and a  private conservator, she actively participates in conferences and workshops and  collaborates with institutions on national and international projects. She attended  workshops such as the Twentieth-century Photographs - Identification and Care with  Sylvie Pénichon (2019, 2022), the Colour Photo & Film Conference in Florence (2022), the  Conservation Science, Technology and Industry conference in Bratislava (2023) and the  ICOM-CC Triennial Conference in Valencia (2023). Since 2019, Kitti Baráthová and Janka  B. Križanová have been working closely with Albertina Museum Wien (Austria) on an  ongoing international collaboration Daguerrotype Project, where they survey, conserve,  and preserve the vast daguerrotype collection of the museum. In November 2023, they  hosted a course within the DITAH Project Autumn School of Photograph Conservation in  St. Florian Abbey (Austria) with the European Research Centre for Book and Paper  Conservation-Restoration. Her abstract got accepted to the 2024 AIC-Annual Meeting in  Salt Lake City, where she will be also presenting her doctoral research within the  Photographic Materials session during May 2024. 

Literature/recommended readings:
• PÉNICHON, Sylvie: Twentieth-Century Color Photographs. The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, 2013.
• WILHELM, Henry: The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs. Preservation Publishing Company, Iowa, 1993.
• ROHRBACH, John: Color! American Photography Transformed. Amon Carter Museum, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2013.
• LAVÉDRINE, Bertrand – GANDOLFO, Jean-Paul: The Lumiére Autochrome. The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, 2013.
• LAVÉDRINE, Bertrand: A Guide to the Preventive Conservation of Photographs Collections. The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, 2003.
• NORRIS, Debra Hess – GUTIERREZ, Jennifer Jae: Issues in the Conservation of Photographs. The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, 2013.
• HIRSCH, Robert; ERF, Greg: Exploring Color Photography: From Film to Pixels. Elsevier Focal Press, 2011.
• FLUECKIGER, Barbara – HIELSCHLER, Eva – WIETLISBACH, Nadine: Color Mania, The Material of Color in Photography and Film, Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich, 2020.

The International Reach of Lippmann Photography
Lippmann photography aka interferential color photography generates direct positives on glass that are dazzling in brilliance and archival stability but which cannot be transferred unto paper. This exciting technical genesis meant, however, that opportunities for spectators, scientists, and photography aficionados to connect with Lippmann photography hinged on the physical photograph and on the use of projection devices, capable of megascopic projection, and were thus scarce! Also, lithographs and engravings failed to transmit its unique shimmering colors and its “jewel-like” quality. As a result, examining the international reach of Lippmann photography challenges historical studies that focus on the medium’s „circulation and mobility” through print culture, simply because printing a Lippmann plate was a dream, not an option.
This presentation addresses one dreamer’s attempt to “print the unprintable”; German engineer Hans Lehmann whose “one hit wonder” Lippmann print has so far received scant scholarly interest. My talk also investigates how, despite the lack of Lippmann prints, knowledge about the process circulated beyond Paris (where Gabriel Lippmann’s lab was located) through other forms of disclosure. Mapping how Lippmann photography reached Sweden, Argentina, and Russia etc. illuminates the international scholarly networks Lippmann was part of as well as the reception (both aesthetic and scientific) of his work.
 
 
Target Audience: Historians of physics, historians of science, French Studies, Global History
 
Dr. Hanin Hannouch (she/her) is Curator of analog and digital media at the Weltmuseum Wien where she is oversees the photography, film and sound collections and vice-president of the European Society for the History of Photography (ESHPh).
She is the editor of the first volume on interferential color photography "Gabriel Lippmann's Colour Photography: Science, Media, Museums" (Amsterdam University Press, 2022), PhotoResearcher’s special issue „Three-Color Photography around 1900: Technologies, Expeditions, Empires“ (vol.37, 2022), and the open-access journal Cinergie’s special issue titled “Destabilizing Histories: (Re-)appropriation in Photography and Cinema” (2020).
She was postdoctoral researcher at the Ethnologisches Museum - Berlin State Museums and at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz / Max-Planck-Institut where she investigated the colonial and imperial entanglements of color photography. She earned her PhD summa cum laude from IMT Lucca, Scuola Alti Studi (2017) with a thesis about Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein as art historian. She completed the international Masters in art history and museology (IMKM) at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris and the University of Heidelberg in Germany (2014). She has also earned a previous Masters (2012) and a Bachelors in European art history, focusing on art in the 20th century, both from Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik in Lebanon. She is currently writing her monograph titled “Color Photography in Imperial Germany”.
 
Recommended Readings: Please visit the ressource section in this group for all things Lippmann!
 
 
 

Understanding colors of Dufaycolor
Jan Hubička

Dufaycolor was an additive process of color photography introduced in 1932 for motion film and in 1935 for still photography (the same year as Kodachrome). It was the most advanced color screen process, but is under-appreciated today because the dyes in their emulsion tend to fade. In a previous talk I discussed the possibility of digital color reconstruction based on high resolution scans of original transparencies (ideally including an infrared channel) which makes it possible to reproduce the original colors.

In order to make the color reconstruction historically authentic, it is necessary to understand details of the process. I will discuss the historical method of printing the Dufaycolor color screen (reseau) and the properties of dyes used to produce it.  Since published data are incomplete, imprecise, and often contradicting each other, I implemented a full digital simulator of the process which makes it possible to turn the spectrum of light seen by the camera into the expected response of Dufaycolor film. I discuss lessons learned from the experiment and how that improves our understanding of the accuracy of color recordings.

There are three main goals of our project:
 1) We would like to find practical methods of digitizing early color photographs which faithfully and completely reproduce the physical object as it is today.
 2) We would like to digitally restore the colors to their appearance at the time of original processing.
 3) We would like to adapt modern algorithms for processing RAW camera images to digitally restore the color of the scene to how it would have appeared at the time of capture and based on that understand the color vision of Dufaycolor film.

This is joint work with Linda Kimrova (Charles University) and Doug Peterson (DT Heritage) with significant support from the National Geographic Society.
 
Jan Hubička  is following on from his presentation to the group on Tuesday, December 19, 2023 when he spoke on Digitizing Paget, Finlay and Dufaycolor photographs at National Geographic Society.  He is an associate professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics, software developer at SUSE LINUX s.r.o. and also a co-founder and a co-director of Šechtl and Voseček Museum of Photography in Tábor, Czech Republic. His interest in early color photography was sparked by Autochromes taken by his great grandfather, Josef Jindřich Šechtl. In 2006 he organized exhibition of early color photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky (first in Europe except for Moscow) for which he made his own tool composing scans of the separation negatives. In 2007 he organized exhibition of (reproductions of) Czech Autochromes which got him into contact with American collector of early color photography, Mark Jacobs. He helped to digitize important part of Mark Jacobs' collection and in 2012 organized exhibition “When the World Turned to Color Early Color Photography from the Mark Jacobs Collection”. Work on regular color screen processes started in 2011 for exhibition of photographs from the American Colony Collection where Mark Jacobs identified negatives for Finlay color process. He also co-organized two international workshops on early color photography, "Legacy of three-color photography" in 2008 and "Space, Color, Motion" in 2013.
Cornwell-Clyne, Adrian. Colour Cinematography. United Kingdom: Champman & Hall, 1951.
https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.15062/page/n303/mode/2up
 
Thorne Baker, Thomas. The Spicer-Dufay Colour Film Process. The Photographic Journal, March, 1932, 109-117
https://archive.rps.org/archive/volume-72
 
Bonamico, C., and T. Thorne Baker. "Dyes and Colours in Photography." Journal of the Society of Dyers and Colourists 49, no. 4 (1933): 103-105.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1478-4408.1933.tb01749.x
 
The Dufaycolor Manual: Of Interest to Advanced Amateurs, Professional Photographers and Printers. United States: Dufaycolor, Incorporated, 1938.
https://filmcolors.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Dufaycolor_Manual_1938_print.pdf
 
Harrison and Horner. "The Principles of Dufaycolor prinitng" The photographic journal, May 1939, 320-329
https://archive.rps.org/archive/volume-79
 

Renwick, F. F.. "The Dufaycolour Process" The photographic journal, January 1935, 28-37
https://archive.rps.org/archive/volume-75/734248

 
Developing a RAW photo "by hand"
https://www.odelama.com/photo/Developing-a-RAW-Photo-by-hand/
 

Madame Yevonde and the VIVEX process - A talk by Disruptive Print
The work presented here is the result of a collaboration between the National Portrait Gallery and Disruptive Print, then part of the Centre for Print Research at the University of the West of England. The National Portrait Gallery approached us when they were looking for someone who could help them to print colour images taken by Madame Yevonde [1] in the 30s of the last century. Madame Yevonde was the most famous user of the VIVEX process [2] , the photomechanical reproduction process for colour photographs before the second world war in the UK. The VIVEX process was a commercial method and therefore only ill documented. What we know is that the images were taken through red, green, and blue filters on black and white film and then printed by layering pigmented gelatine layers in cyan, magenta, and yellow in top of each other, but how exactly is lost. We will discuss the registration of the three negatives and possible printing methods.
 
Disruptive Print
Disruptive Print is a collective of 4 printmakers with diverse backgrounds. Susanne Klein and Abigail Trujillo Vazquez are physicists, Elizabete Kozlovska is a conservator and Harrie Fuller a printmaker. Our research interests are old, partly forgotten, printing methods and how to
transform them into new, 21 st century, technologies with the aim to make them relevant again. All four of us are practising artists and our work can be seen in national and international print exhibitions.
Recommended Readings:
[1] N. P. Gallery. "Yevonde: A beginner's guide." National Portrait Gallery.
https://www.npg.org.uk/blog/yevonde-a-beginners-guide (accessed 25 of September,
2023).
[2] F. W. Coppin and D. A. Spencer, "Basic Features of the "VIVEX" process," The
Photographic Journal, vol. 88b, Section B: Scientific and Technical Photography, p. 5,
1948.

Digitizing Paget, Finlay and Dufaycolor photographs at National Geographic Society
Jan Hubička 
 
Early color collection of National Geographic Society consists of over 15,000 plates. In 2020, the Society began the Early Color Photography Conservation and Digitization Project. Probably for the first time a large archive of early color photographs has been digitized in resolution high enough to capture the individual color patches of the mosaic color processes.  While the archive consists mostly of Autochromes, in this talk I will focus on processes based on color screen filters with periodically repeating color patterns (Paget and Finlay color plates and Dufaycolor). These presented interesting problems for digitization, since the regular color pattern interferes with the Bayer filter in the camera. The high resolution scans also makes it possible to digitally reconstruct original color and geometry. It also motivated further research about manufacture process of these materials, color dyes used and other interesting aspects of these color processes. 
 
This is a joint work with Mark Jacobs, Linda Kimrová (Charles University), Kenzie Klaeser (Digital Transitions), Sara Manco (National Geographic Society), Doug Peterson (Digital Transitions).
 

Jan Hubička is an associate professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics, software developer at SUSE LINUX s.r.o. and also a co-founder and a co-director of Šechtl and Voseček Museum of Photography in Tábor, Czech Republic. His interest in early color photography was sparkled by Autochromes taken by his great grandfather, Josef Jindřich Šechtl. In 2006 he organized exhibition of early color photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky (first in Europe except for Moscow) for which he made his own tool composing scans of the separation negatives. In 2007 he organized exhibition of (reproductions of) Czech Autochromes which got him into contact with American collector of early color photography, Mark Jacobs. He helped to digitize important part of Mark Jacobs' collection and in 2012 organized exhibition “When the World Turned to Color Early Color Photography from the Mark Jacobs Collection”. Work on regular color screen processes started in 2011 for exhibition of photographs from the American Colony Collection where Mark Jacobs identified negatives for Finlay color process. He also co-orgnized two international workshops on early color photography, "Legacy of three-color phorography" in 2008 and "Space, Color, Motion" in 2013.
 
Reading
Geoffrey Barker, Jan Hubička, Mark Jacobs, Linda Kimrová, Kendra Meyer, Doug Peterson: Finlay, Thames, Dufay, and Paget color screen process collections: Using digital registration of viewing screens to reveal original color
https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.16076
 
Jan Hubička, Linda Kimrová, Kenzie Klaeser, Sara Manco, Doug Peterson: Digital analysis of early color photographs taken using regular color screen processes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09631

The Interferential Colour Plate (aka Lippmann Plate), an introduction to the first true and permanent colour photographic technique in the history of photography
 
Materiality, Identification, and Conservation Challenges of Lippmann Plates
Jens Gold, PhD candidate, Preus Museum – National Museum of Photography, Norway
 
Keywords: Lippmann-Interferential-colour-plate, Interferential-colour, Lippmann, Neuhauss, Lehmann, Krone, Hertzberg
 
In 1891 the first true and permanent colour photographic technique in the history of photography was presented by Gabriel Lippmann (1845-1921). Almost immediately after the presentation, several photographers and scientists started to experiment and produce images with Lippmann colour. This utmost fascinating technique depends on the standing wave phenomenon of light, it therefore does not need pigments, nor dyes, to perform. Looking at the activity and the historic literature, several thousand Lippmann interferential colour images must have been produced. Today however, only a few institutions and collectors worldwide possess original examples of these rare colour images.
This photographic colour technique appears in a variety of conditions and presentation forms which highly affect their vulnerability, permanence, and viewing properties. The Preus Museum – the National Museum of Photography in Norway – has a considerable collection of twelve unique Lippmann colour plates made by two key pioneers of Lippmann colour: Richard Neuhauss and Hans Lehmann. In addition, a unique historic collection with books, papers and objects concerning the Lippmann process is part of this collection. The group of objects builds the basis of a four-year PhD research project that started in the summer of 2021, by the conservation department of Preus Museum [1]. The project aims to investigate Lippmann colour in terms of its materiality, history and its preservation and conservation challenges. The legendary interferential colour photographs by Richard Neuhauss, Hans Lehmann, Hermann Krone [2], Gabriel Lippmann and John Hertzberg are in focus of the presentation to be held. It will give an introduction to the history, technology, presentation, and preservation challenges of Lippmann colour plates. Examples of interferential colour plates will be shown during the presentation. This will be items from the Preus Museum collection, the Norwegian Museum of Technology, the Hermann Krone collection at the TU-Dresden, the Lette Verein Berlin as well as from the Photo Elysée Lausanne. 
 
[1] J. Gold, Materiality, Identification, and Conservation of Lippmann Plates - in Hanin Hannouch (Editor) Gabriel Lippmann’s Colour Photography: Science, Media, Museums; Amsterdam University Press, Florence 2022, Chapter 9, pp. 213-250.
[2] J. Gold, Hermann Krone’s contributions to Lippmann colour photography – colour plates, materiality, and condition; Rundbrief Photography; coming 2024.
 
CV:
Jens Gold has been a photograph conservator at Preus Museum: National Museum for Photography (Norway) since 2002. Currently, he is PhD Candidate at the University of Oslo – Institute for Archaeology, Conservation and History, with the research project: “Lippmann Interference Photography: History, Materiality and Treatment Challenges”. He was co-curator of Slow Color Photography – Lippmann interferential color photography in the Preus Museum Collection. In 1998 he completed his studies in photograph conservation from HTW Berlin - University of Applied Sciences, and in 2018 he graduated from the University of Oslo with an MA in object conservation. From 1999 to 2001, he was a fellow in the Mellon Advanced Residency Program in Photograph Conservation at the George Eastman House and the Image Permanence Institute in Rochester, New York.
Literature:  Hanin Hannouch (Editor): Gabriel Lippmann’s Colour Photography: Science, Media, Museums; Amsterdam University Press 2022.

Filters, Optics, Visions: Color Imaging and Missionary Photography in Modern China
 
Abstract: 
 
Cameras and visual technologies accompanied missionaries as they undertook diverse cultural, political, and religious projects in China across the first half of the twentieth century. In the process, missionaries and Chinese associates thought about and deployed evolving forms of color image-making and photography, tapping into global visual cultures with nineteenth century (and earlier) historical trajectories. Vivid evangelistic posters in quasi-photographic styles, hand-tinted lantern slides and photographic prints, and later color film embodied ideas about the roles of color in relation to cross-cultural visual modernities, local and international. Furthermore, these visual practices and products ultimately escaped their missionary mold and entered global perceptions, shaping transpacific views of modern China alongside Chinese engagements with the world. Drawing from his new book, Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China, Professor Joseph W. Ho will discuss intersections between color imaging, technological and religious imaginations, and transnational visions that transformed twentieth century Sino-Western encounters on both sides of the lens.
 
Short Bio:
 
Joseph W. Ho is Associate Professor of History at Albion College, Michigan, and a Center Associate at the University of Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. He is a historian of modern East Asia, US-China encounters, and transnational visual culture and media. Ho is the co-editor of War and Occupation in China: The Letters of an American Missionary from Hangzhou, 1937–1938 (Lehigh University Press, 2017), and the author of Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2022). In 2024–2025, he will be the EDS-Stewart Distinguished Research Fellow at Boston College's Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, and is currently preparing his next monograph, Bamboo Wireless: Mediating the Cold War in Asia.  

Chromatic Imagination: Realising Early Colour Photography in Britain, 1890 to 1939
When colour photography emerged in industrialised societies in the late nineteenth century it sparked industrial and scientific interest for some and aesthetic and conceptual concern for others. Over the course of fifty years, from 1890 until 1939, the accessibility of colour photography changed dramatically, culminating with the widespread uptake of Kodak Corporation’s Kodachrome colour-coupler technology in the late 1930s. Kodachrome reversal film redefined the photographic industry. It was celebrated as the solution to nearly one hundred years of research and development concentrated on finding a way to make affordable and practical colour pictures, and was so proficient that by the early 1940s it was in position to usurp the majority of competing colour processes established before it.
The flourishing industry of colour photography that existed before Kodachrome was driven largely by improvements in technology, including the introduction of aniline dyes and faster equipment; increased accessibility because of changing economies; and evolving conceptions of colour in public consciousness as it related art, advertising and collective taste. Although most nascent colour photography enterprises failed, the sheer volume of processes introduced signifies an enormous amount of creative velocity attributable to diverse thought and experimentation on behalf of colour photography’s innumerable stakeholders. Through consideration of the meaning of colour in contemporary British society, and the economic and social networks that underpinned the industry, this thesis aims to establish a stronger understanding of the competitive and dynamic market for early colour photography between 1890 and 1939.
Bio
Hana Kaluznick is Assistant Curator of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). She was Assistant Curator of the expansion of the V&A Photography Centre (2023) and has contributed to other V&A displays including Known and Strange (2021) and Valérie Belin / Reflection (2019). She is a PhD student at the University of Liverpool studying the industrial history of early colour photography.
Suggested reading is the first chapters of ‘Chromophobia’ by David Batchelor 
https://archive.org/details/chromophobia00batc_0/page/24/mode/2up
Target audience: Historians of Britan, Curators, Industrial Historians.

TBA

 
Eastman Kodak and Early Color Photography: From Competitive Threat to Research and Promotional Tool 
by Prof. Joris Mercelis (Johns Hopkins University).
My presentation will briefly outline my current book project, “The Long Shadow of Kodak: Market Dominance and Scientific Control in Twentieth-Century Photography,” before turning to the aspects of this work-in-progress that might be most relevant to members of this working group. My book examines the nature and scope of the Eastman Kodak Co.’s influence over photographic knowledge production and circulation, exploring to what extent this multinational enterprise could translate its near-monopolistic position on markets for photographic film and cameras into scientific and technological control. Although color photography is not a specific focus of this research, it mattered in several different ways, three of which I highlight in this talk. First, from at least 1904 onward, Kodak founder George Eastman and his associates approached color photography as a (potential) technological alternative that posed a major competitive threat and therefore had to be controlled.
This concern about market dominance prompted Kodak to invest substantially in color-related research and development work—most famously but by no means exclusively at the Kodak Research Laboratory in Rochester, NY, which was even partly established for this reason. Second, in parallel to Kodak’s search for a color photography process suitable for the mass amateur market, the company’s researchers managed to improve the sensitivity of photographic materials to specific regions of the light spectrum, thus helping to create new photographic visions valuable for scientific and military purposes. For instance, from the 1910s onward, Kodak supported the development of infrared photography and the “thermal vision” that this technique enabled. Not untypically, Kodak took into account the interests in infrared imaging of users ranging from anthropologists and art conservators to astronomers and the photographic surveillance personnel of the U.S. Army Air Corps, and several of these groups effectively came to depend on the company for their specialized photographic needs. Third and finally, within five years of the public announcement of three-color Kodachrome film in 1935, scientific institutions with which Kodak collaborated had started using color photography as a marketing tool. For example, in the context of a tropical photography research program initiated early in World War II, Kodak and its military and civilian partners used Kodachrome not only for research purposes (e.g., to document material-damaging fungi) but also to generate enthusiasm for the study of tropical biology. More specifically, with Kodak’s support, Kodachrome color slides and motion pictures were deployed extensively to promote the U.S.-controlled biological station in Panama that later became known as the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
 
Joris Mercelis is an assistant professor at the Department of History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. His research interests include the economic history of science and technology and the histories of chemical and photographic technology, science, and business. He is the author of Beyond Bakelite: Leo Baekeland and the Business of Science and Invention (MIT Press, 2020) and a co-editor of special journal issues of Ambix, History and Technology, and Management & Organizational History.
 
Recommended reading: 
Mercelis Joris. “Commercializing Academic Knowledge and Reputation in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Photography and Beyond.” History and Technology 23–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2017.1338553.
Mercelis Joris. 2022. “‘Men Don’t Like to Work Under a Woman’: Female Chemists in the Photographic Manufacturing Industry Ca. 1918–1950.” Ambix 291–319. https://doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2022.2097980.