The very first color photograph was taken by a true polymath, James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell’s work on electromagnetic theory paved the way for the theory of relativity. In his off time, he taught for free at the local community college, engineered bridges, and discovered additive color. His work on the perception of color led him at the ripe old age of 30 to create the world’s first permanent color photograph. Well, kind of permanent, anyways. His technique involved taking three pictures of the subject, each with a colored gel, red, green, and blue. To display it, one had use lamps to project colored light through the three monochrome transparencies. It was all pretty cumbersome.
1861: The world’s first color photograph – a tartan ribbon
It would be another seventeen years before Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron would perfect a heliochrome process that allowed a color photo to be fixed using a chemical process. Red and blue worked pretty well, but other colors were harder. His view of Agen is an early example of this technique.
1877: A view of Agen
It wouldn’t be until 1891 that Gabriel Lippmann came up with an incredibly intricate process that changed the refractrive index of an emulsion by generating standing waves at different wavelengths. It worked, it offered the full spectrum of colors, but it had a limited viewing angle, required a diffuse source to be shined on it to be visible, and was incredibly impractical. Still, it was considered revolutionary at the time. So much so, that it netted him a Nobel Prize.
Early Lippman Photo (undated)
Time stands still for no man. Only five years later, the Joly color screen became briefly popular. By shooting and displaying the pictures through a filter consisting of colored lines – red, green, and blue – the eye was fooled in much the same way as modern color screens do.
Then, in 1907 along came Autochrome. The first color photography technique to have enduring success, Autochrome uses a sheet coated with microscopic colored translucent grains. Of potato starch. Yes. The first widely adopted color photography standard was a piece of glass covered in a very thin layer of potato. Unsurprisingly, this one didn’t earn anybody a Nobel Prize. But it did capture the first truly iconic color images.
1910: Still Life with Art Glass – Harry T. Shriver
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