The Cavalcade of Color (original) (raw)

The Cavalcade of Color. Kodak and the 1939 World’s Fair

Etudes Photographiques, 2012

An earlier version of this article was presented at the one-day conference 'Le Spectacle de l'industrie / Exhibiting Industry,' organized by Claire-Lise Debluë and Anne-Katrin Weber at the Centre des sciences historiques de la culture at the University of Lausanne on June 1, 2012.

Color rush: American color photography from Stieglitz to Sherman

Choice Reviews Online, 2013

Academic interest in colour photography has been undergoing a renewal in recent years. Until the 1990s, roughly speaking, studies revolved around documenting its technical history, presenting outstanding representative images from different eras, and retracing the limited interest colour drew from respected artists. From around the turn of this century, colour has been eliciting increasing attention and as a result its history is gaining depth, contrast, and detail. The greater ease of illustrating books and articles with colour imagery brought about by the digital revolution in publishing has facilitated this movement. The most visible results have been a multitude of monographs dedicated to or including colour work and a handful of new illustrated surveys of the history of colour photography or of significant parts of it. The three books reviewed here are complementary and valuable contributions to colour photography research, pushing it in the direction of a more critical history better synthesising technical, aesthetic, and cultural issues. All three have ties to museums: Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman accompanied an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and Color: American Photography Transformed accompanied an exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Sylvie Pénichon, author of Twentieth-Century Color Photographs, is a conservator, formerly at the Amon Carter and now at the Art Institute of Chicago, and her book is published by the Getty Conservation Institute. These ties are indicative of how the study of colour photography, although facilitated by changes in publishing, is driven by public enthusiasm for such imagery paired with its firm establishment on the art market and in museum collections and activities. Fittingly, therefore, the first two books focus on artistic and professional uses of colour photography, and the third on the numerous processes used to produce colour photographs over time and on the material realities of these images. All three offer balanced overviews of their chosen topics and are academically up to date, integrating recent scholarship and discussing issues or providing information relevant to understanding colour photography's complex history and the reasons for its fragmented historiography. Not least among these issues are colour photography's circulation via both photographic materials and commercial print media, and the multifaceted reception of its 'realism'. Color Rush studies American artistic and/or professional photography from when colour 'became available as a mass medium'-defined as the arrival of the Autochrome in 1907 and its subsequent exploration by Pictorialist photographers-'to the moment when it no longer seemed an unusual choice for artists'-fixed at Sally Eauclaire's 1981 landmark group exhibition and book The New Color Photography. The volume opens with separate introductory texts by curators Katherine A. Bussard and Lisa Hostetler. Bussard sets the stage, providing an overview of important events and images of the period analysed. Hostetler revisits the same chronology, focusing on the ambiguity of colour photography's 'perceived relationship to notions of realism'. The main body of the book then consists of easy-to-browse independent sections of two to six pages presenting individual photographers or themes-National Geographic, Hollywood, Newspapers, Kodak, FSA Photographers, Life, and Monographs. Color Rush's attachment to 'a contextualized history' of its topic is visible from the first flip through the publication: over fifty illustrations in the main section feature colour photographs as presented in layouts, advertisements, slide mounts, and so forth (which is not the case in American Photography Transformed). The authors of Color Rush wished to be attentive to 'the fluidity of boundaries between high and low art forms' and one of the book's most interesting and original contributions is significant discussion of colour photography in print. This has been surprisingly rare in colour scholarship, despite the fact that print media, especially newspapers and magazines, were essential factors in the adoption of colour photography and in its visibility for a wide public in the mid-twentieth century. Color Rush includes accounts of how Fernand Bourges and Anton Bruehl masterfully brought

The Critical Eye: Reading Commercial Photography

American Quarterly, 2006

The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929. By Elspeth H. Brown. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 344 pages. $49.95 (cloth).

Pressing Buttons: Kodak, Advertising Psychotechnics, and the Politics of Graphic Design, c. 1915

Art History, 2024

This essay focuses on a print advertising campaign that the Eastman Kodak Company launched in 1912 to promote the services of studio photographers. Examining period conceptions of mental picturing, the social and racial dimensions of design, and print media as an extension of the scientific laboratory, I argue that the open layouts of the series establish consumer imagination as the fundamental advertising apparatus. By reconceiving what the print advert could do, and sacrificing illustration in the layout so that a more personal and powerful impression could emerge, Kodak’s advertising department made the advert a thought machine every bit as complex as the company’s most advanced imaging technologies.

Colorsnap! Colour Photography, the Market in Patents and the 1929 Crash

History of Photography

Although very short-lived, the Colorsnap process, promoted in 1928-29 by the small British company Colour Snapshots (1928) Ltd, is mentioned in several histories of colour photography processes as a key example of a false start in colour photography. Such accounts emphasise problems with technical quality and poor industrial organisation, but miss the key role of the market in patents and changes in investment practices in the period. From 1926 to 1929, the London Stock Exchange saw a frenzy of speculative investment in companies touting new innovations in media, linked to gramophone, radio, cinema, photography and photo-telegraphy. Like most of these companies, Colour Snapshots was inexperienced and completely dependent on the success of an untested patent. The company promoter deployed the then-common strategy of underpricing, consequently the company was undercapitalised and unable to finance production. Colour Snapshots was liquidated in the Great Slump of 1929-33. This article situates it in wider cultures of the market, in cultural practices of invention, and ideologies of modernity and innovation. It argues that the rise and fall of Colorsnap expresses the opportunistic practices of invention and speculative finance of the time.