Color is a notoriously difficult subject within the history and theory of photography, often judged by its technical success or failure. But the difficulties of color—technical as well as aesthetic—reveal instabilities between a technology of reproduction and the world it is supposed to replicate.
In this invited lecture presented by the Research and Academic Program, Rachel Lee Hutcheson (Rochester Institute of Technology) analyzes a number of early camera-recorded color photographic technologies from the turn of the twentieth century in which local color was achieved not through hand-applied means, but as phantasmic arrangements of red, green, and blue color separations configured by lantern projectors, stereoscopic viewers, or screen-plates viewed within diascope “mirror-boxes.” Although thoroughly material, the so-called “Natural Color” photograph presents its image as an event, experienced in space and time with its viewer. That is, color images were ephemeral, fanciful, or illusory at the same time their photographic likeness assured the image's "reality." As visual artifacts, these color photographs can literally show a more colorful past; but they also compel us to historicize color as a shaping force of modern life and question the very materialities and viewing modalities that make up the “photographic.”
A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.
Image caption: Frederic Ives, American Falls, Goat Island (detail), ca. 1890–1894. Kromogram. Collection Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy. Digital color composite by R. Hutcheson
Color is a notoriously difficult subject within the history and theory of photography, often judged by its technical success or failure. But the difficulties of color—technical as well as aesthetic—reveal instabilities between a technology of reproduction and the world it is supposed to replicate.
In this invited lecture presented by the Research and Academic Program, Rachel Lee Hutcheson (Rochester Institute of Technology) analyzes a number of early camera-recorded color photographic technologies from the turn of the twentieth century in which local color was achieved not through hand-applied means, but as phantasmic arrangements of red, green, and blue color separations configured by lantern projectors, stereoscopic viewers, or screen-plates viewed within diascope “mirror-boxes.” Although thoroughly material, the so-called “Natural Color” photograph presents its image as an event, experienced in space and time with its viewer. That is, color images were ephemeral, fanciful, or illusory at the same time their photographic likeness assured the image's "reality." As visual artifacts, these color photographs can literally show a more colorful past; but they also compel us to historicize color as a shaping force of modern life and question the very materialities and viewing modalities that make up the “photographic.”
A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.
Image caption: Frederic Ives, American Falls, Goat Island (detail), ca. 1890–1894. Kromogram. Collection Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy. Digital color composite by R. Hutcheson
