Spectral Colors: Peeping and Projecting Spectacular Reality, 1890–1920s
Frederic E. Ives (American, 1856-1937) first patented a composite three-color photographic process called the Krōmskōp Photochromoscope in 1894. This presentation will provide an outline of Ives and his various 3-color composite color devices, both stereographic and its projection counterpart, as he attempted to commercialize the Krōmskōp in the United States and in Britain in the 1890s. This so-called “Natural Color” process was exceedingly complex and hardly practicable for most amateurs. Yet, Ives’s Krōmskōp is productively viewed as a case study to consider the relationship between reality and fantasy in the color image as it was experienced in the enclosed color stereoscopic, and its translation as a projected, synthesized color image in collective viewing occasions. Recasting the familiar as spectacular and the fantastic as tangibly real, the spectral arrangements of red, green, and blue filters configured by lantern projectors and stereoscopic viewers presented its image as an event experienced in space and time with its viewer.
Rachel Lee Hutcheson, PhD is a Lecturer at Columbia University and Cooper Union in New York. Her research interests include histories of photography, film and video, and media theory. Her dissertation, “Natural Color Photography, 1890-1920: Technology, Gender, Colonialism,” engages with the relationship between color, color vision, and photo-filmic technology at the turn of the twentieth century. Part of this research has been published in Grey Room (Summer, 2024) and 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (Summer, 2025); her writing on contemporary art has appeared in Millennium Film Journal. She has presented her work at the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, the European Research Council project Chromotope, and at the IKKM in Weimar, Germany. Rachel is presenting on color stereography at the upcoming 34th International Panorama Council Conference in Lisbon. Her research has been supported by the Library of Congress, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Mellon Humanities International Travel Fellowship. She has degrees from Virginia Commonwealth University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Suggested Reading:
Rachel Wetzel, “Instinctive Genius: Frederic Eugene Ives & The Krōmscōp Color Photography System,” Photo-Researcher 37 (2022), 40-55.
Rachel Hutcheson, “Coming Attraction: The Event of Color, Techniques of Screening and Filtering in Early “Natural” Color Film and Photography,” Grey Room 96 (2024), 6-29.
