Whether Mechanical Mimesis: A Sensitometric look at Colour Photography in the 19th century.
Presenter: Rahul Sharma
This presentation aims to be a provocation for theoretical discussion on the notion of mimesis and referentiality in colour photography in the 19th century. To this end, I will present a brief summary of constraints colour reproduction faced in the 19th century (and still faces today) from a colour science and sensitometric perspective. To do so, I will use examples like Photochrom (Aäc) process, and Maxwell’s Tartan Ribbon, and compare them with hand painted photographs.
Here, Photochrom is a colour photolithographic process that could generate colour prints from single black and white negatives. Maxwell’s Tartan Ribbon was a demonstration carried out in 1861, wherein a tartan ribbon was photographed in three monochrome plates using Red, Green, and Blue colour filters; and the resultant positive images projected together to create the world’s first three colour image.
I will argue that colour in photographs as a mechanistic process, approached (and still does) absolute fidelity asymptotically. This is due to technical constraints still being resolved to date. Rather, any semblance of colouristic ‘reality’ in most 19th century photographs was a result of considerable manipulation by the practitioner. I will further contend that the extent of the manipulation is such that there exist close parallels between three colour prints, and hand-painted photographs.
Rahul Sharma is a graduate of the program in photograph conservation from University of Amsterdam, and the conservation program of the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, specializing in technical imaging. In addition to his conservation practice, Sharma is a practicing darkroom printer.
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Suggested readings:
- Arthur von Hübl, Three Colour Printing and Production of Photographic Pigment Pictures in Natural Colours (https://archive.org/details/threecolourphoto00hbrich)
- E.J. Wall, History of Three Colour Photography, Ch. 1, 10, 11. (https://archive.org/details/historyofthreeco00ejwa)
- R.M. Evans, Some Notes on Maxwell’s Colour Photographs (https://www.aic-color.org/resources/Documents/preaic1961maxwell-evans.pdf)
- R.W.G. Hunt, The Reproduction of Colours, Ch. 1, 2, 4, 7.(Ch. 7 might be a bit technical, but I would recommend skipping the math and parsing it as prose.) (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dkYghUfWnal3LY8ASSKngGVJ-af-kH9x/view?usp=share_link)
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Target audience: Newcomers to the research on color photography circa 1900, PhD students, curators, conservators, established researchers.