The True Colour of Photography (original) (raw)
Related papers
JAIC Special Issue on Colour and Light
2017
The inspiration for a special issue of the Journal of the Association Internationale de la Couleur (JAIC) about ‘colour and light’ grew out of a conversation between Associate Editor Vien Cheung and myself, Verena M. Schindler, during the AIC 2015 Midterm Meeting in Tokyo, Japan. Potential authors related to the topic were determined and then invited to submit papers for review. The result is the present Volume 17 (2017), which includes eleven papers about the visual experience of colour and light as well as about ‘opening the eyes’ and ‘making visible’ and is aimed at persons interested in the creative fields of art, design, and architecture.
The Colors of Black-and-White Photography
In: The Colors of Photography, edited by Bettina Gockel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 201-230.
Monochrome photographs are now commonly referred to as being “in black and white,” but before photographing “in color” became common, from the mid-1930s, a vibrant chromatic culture existed in photography. Scholarly interest in print color as a cultural phenomenon, however, has been very limited and historicization of its vocabulary inexistent. This text addresses the disjunction between the colors of early photographs on paper and the way they are described today. It evaluates what colors “black-and-white” photographs actually were and how the photographic community engaged with the issue of print coloration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a close analysis of the vocabulary used to describe and categorize color (or its perceived absence) in photography, print coloration and its lexicon emerge as meaningful, interdependent artifacts for understanding how individuals used an unprecedentedly mechanical image-making technique as a means of creation. https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/552600
Gabriel Lippmann's Colour Photography-A Critical Introduction
Gabriel Lippmann's Colour Photography Science, Media, Museums, 2022
Gabriel Lippmann’s Colour Photography: A Critical Introduction (Hanin Hannouch) This introduction, in lieu of a streamlined biography of physicist Gabriel Lippmann (1845–1921), complicates photography historian Georges Potonniée’s three canonical predicates about Lippmann's interferential colour photography. These predicates, which have shaped most studies about him so far, are: Lippmann’s association with France, his position as the sole inventor of interferential colour photography, and the myth of the “non-use” of this medium. After presenting the state of the art, the introduction offers readers interdisciplinary methods and considerations that embrace the complexity of the interferential image, positioning at the interplay between science, media, and museums.
A Brief History of Light & Photography
Pixiq.com (website of Sterling Publishing), 2010
This fully illustrated 23 page paper traces the history of photography and our understanding of light from prehistoric times to the present day and also speculates about the future. From Aristotle to Einstein the camera is much older than most realize. Because photography can record fine detail and freeze a moment of the past, it has also transformed our modern understanding of time and also provided a record of the past which was previously unavailable.
From eye to machine: Shifting authority in color measurement
B. Saunders and J. Van Brakel (eds.), Theories, Technologies and Instrumentalities of Colour: Anthropological and Historiographic Perspectives, 2002
Given a subject so imbued with contention and conflicting theoretical stances, it is remarkable that automated instruments ever came to replace the human eye as sensitive arbiters of color specification. Yet, dramatic shifts in assumptions and practice did occur in the first half of the twentieth century. How and why was confidence transferred from careful observers to mechanized devices when the property being measured – color – had become so closely identified with human physiology and psychology? A fertile perspective on the problem is via the history of science and technology, paying particular attention to social groups and disciplinary identity to determine how those factors affected their communities’ cognitive territory. There were both common and discordant threads motivating the various technical groups that took on the problems of measuring light and color from the late nineteenth century onwards, and leading them towards the development of appropriate instruments for themselves. The transition from visual to photoelectric methods could be portrayed as a natural evolution, replacing the eye by an alternative roviding more sensitivity and convenience – indeed, this is the conventional positivist view propounded by technical histories. However, the adoption of new measurement technologies seldom is simple, and frequently has a significant cultural component. Beneath this slide towards automation lay a raft of implicit assumptions about objectivity, the nature of the observer, the role of instruments, and the trade-offs between standardization and descriptive power. While espousing rational arguments for a physical detector of color, its proponents weighted their views with tacit considerations. The reassignment of trust from the eye to automated instruments was influenced as much by the historical context as by intellectual factors. I will argue that several distinct aspects were involved, which include the reductive view of color provided by the trichromatic theory; the impetus provided by its association with photometry; the expanding mood for a quantitative and objective approach to scientific observation; and, the pressures for commercial standardization. As suggested by these factors, there was another shift of authority at play: from one technical specialism to another. The regularization of color involved appropriation of the subject by a particular set of social interests: communities of physicists and engineers espousing a ‘physicalist’ interpretation, rather than psychologists and physiologists for whom color was conceived as a more complex phenomenon. Moreover, the sources for automated color measurement, and instrumentation for measuring color, were primarily from the industrial sphere rather than from academic science. To understand these shifts, then, this chapter explores differing views of the importance of observers, machines and automation.
Perception, 2009
Reading Richard Gregory's 1977 paper was a turning point in my scientific journey. No, I lie. I never read the article until much later. My research in 1977 was mostly about memory but in 1979 I attended a SIGGRAPH conference in Chicago where Richard presented his demonstrations of the loss of face recognition with an image having colour but no luminance contrast. The effect was magical and, inspired by Richard's flapping eyebrows, his big smile, and a laugh boasting of the fun of vision research, I abandoned my memory studies, bought all sorts of computer gear to capture the world on video and turn it into pure colour, stuck every imaginable image under the camera and within two days, with the help of Stuart Anstis and Olga Favreau, I was a vision scientist with material for a decade of papers. Thank you Richard, vision research is a fabulous, roller coaster ride of adventure. Memory research is, of course, very, very important, but really so slowly paced in comparison. But Richard's 1977 article was mysteriously numbered '1'. Where was number 2? Was Richard channeling Marcel Duchamps? When Ted Adelson wondered if we could turn the whole world into pure colour, we had an opening. The resulting article (in 1992 in Perception with Priscilla Heard as third author) took the number 2 spot in this series and corrected Richard's unfortunate mixture of Latin and Greek roots, "Vision with equiluminant colour contrast: 2. A large-scale technique and observations". In the end we didn't make the whole world into pure colour but we did succeed with half of the world.