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The Color Event .. The History of Photography .. The Book of Photography

The Color Event

No student of photography will be surprised to learn that Niepce and Daguerre had thought of color photography. They had made some fruitless attempts. Everything is colored in nature and the camera captured reality so well that it seemed necessary to show these things in their natural colors. Photographers undoubtedly thought that the secret to producing colors lay in the correct and balanced use of the different chemicals used in the processing, but they needed extensive knowledge of chemistry and physics as well, which no one had at the beginning of the invention.

The birth of color photography dates back to 1861 when the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell gave a lecture in which he said: All gradations of colors can appear by mixing the lights of the primary colors - blue, green and red - in different proportions. He proved this by passing white light through colored glass plates and displaying the result on a screen. It is the principle of the additive method of colors as it was later applied to photography. The subtraction method was later described by the Frenchman Louis Ducos d'Haron in his book "Colors in Photography and the Solution of the Problem" published in 1869. Ducos d'Haron presented all the basic principles of the modern color photograph in its two methods: addition and subtraction. The latter is based on the fact that elements absorb all radiations complementary to their own color and reflect other radiations. For many years, color photography remained an unattainable dream. Then, in 1879, the German Hermann Vogel, a chemistry teacher at the Technische Hochschule (Technical School) in Berlin, discovered that the collodion plate, which is normally sensitive only to violet-blue radiation, can be sensitive to green in the treatment of some dyes with aniline. This allowed the creation of plates sensitive to colored radiations, which remained insensitive to red and oversensitive to violet-blue. It was only in 1906 that Ratten and Wainwright of London introduced the plate sensitive to all colors of the spectrum on the market commercially.

In the practical field of color photography, the first important event was the invention of the color camera, invented by Frederick Ives of Philadelphia in 1891. His principle was derived from Clerk Maxwell's theory: he took three plates (each plate recording a primary color) on a single plate. He made a positive image from each plate, which was examined in a special device that Ives called a photochromoscope. Other researchers conducted further research, but it never found practical applications. The three-color mosaic filter method invented by Louis and Auguste Lumière was given a breakthrough in 1904. The exposure on a color plate was forty times greater than that required for black and white, and the slides were very dense. Color photography was born and could be commercialized. Of the two methods (addition and deletion), the latter was the most widely used in the following years. Rudolf Fischer made an important contribution by discovering the color couplers in 1930, which would later allow the production of films with three superimposed layers: each layer is sensitive only to one of the primary forms of light. The first color film by deletion did not appear until 23 years later, when Leopold Mann and Leopold Godowsky developed Kodachrome in the research laboratories of the Eastman Kodak Company.

Color film completely transformed the fields of photography and cinema, except for daily newspapers. The most recent and most distinctive development of color photography is without a doubt the instant color photograph with automatic processing, which was commercially launched in 1963 by the Polaroid Land Company.

In other words, new research and inventions had been obsessed with photographers for more than a century, and chemical treatments in the laboratory were an important part of the work. Thus, one of the first French amateur photographers declared in 1839, "Even the least successful photograph gives me indescribable happiness."

A first step towards success:

A portrait of the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who discovered the principles of the trichromatic method of color photography.

A color machine:

This machine was invented by Jose in 1925 to take color photographs. It was possible to take only a set of three prints before refilling the machine.

A device for examining color photographs:

The photochromoscope invented by Frederick Ives was used to examine color photographs. This machine took three negative prints, one for each primitive color, and produced three positive images. The photochromoscope appeared in 1892 and was followed in 1893 by a stereoscopic model.