Color Photography in the 19th Century and Early 20th Century: Sciences, Technologies, Empires

Color Photography and Surgical Propaganda: Archival and National Narratives. Presented by Christine Slobogin

During the Second World War and shortly afterwards, color photography was a particularly useful tool for plastic surgeons still in the process of solidifying the reputation of their field as serious, as dedicated to reconstruction rather than simply aesthetics, and as scientifically innovative. This talk will give several examples of how Percy Hennell’s three-color photography was utilized in the world of reconstructive plastic surgery in the mid-century to help to, not only illustrate, but to define this developing field. In international lecture tours, in overtly propagandistic publications, in stories told by plastic surgeons, and in the present-day construction and framing of plastic surgery archives, Hennell’s photographs played and continue to play an outsized role in the narratives that plastic surgeons tell about themselves and about the prominence and innovation of British plastic surgery at home and abroad.

Christine Slobogin, an art historian of medicine, is an Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

Responding to the Autochromes of George Terziev by Katherine Greenleaf

Abstract:

George Terziev, my great-grandfather, was born in 1876 to an illiterate mother and impoverished father in Bansko, present-day Bulgaria, then part of the Ottoman Empire.  He was the first of their children to survive to adulthood.  He somewhat improbably managed to obtain a basic education at a missionary school in Samokov, emigrated to America, attended a state college, then Harvard (BA/MA), and was working toward a PhD in organic chemistry when he dropped out to move on with the rest of his life.  George went on to have a long career as a research chemist for the Solvay Process in upstate New York; his main area, in which he held patents, was the soda ash process.  George married an American woman with old roots in this country and had three children, whom he never taught his native language.  He died in 1960.

George was a dedicated amateur photographer who shot over 60 autochromes still in my family's possession between about 1915 and 1935.  George was not a man of leisure; he worked for a living, and his life and background push back against the narrative that shooting autochromes was a rarified experience reserved for the affluent or primarily enjoyed in camera clubs.  While George was a dedicated member of the Men's Garden Club of America (and left a voluminous record in that regard), I have no evidence that he was ever part of any camera or photo club in Syracuse.  Instead, the autochromes (and the many hundreds of plain black-and-white photos) that he shot in the teens, twenties, and thirties appear to have been shot for private enjoyment only and are best understood through the lenses of vernacular photography, assimilation, and identity formation.

The autochromes span the period in George's life when he married, had children, and watched those children grow up.  While becoming a parent is a common impetus for engaging more in photography, George was working through the fallout of something specific: he had, at one point, hoped to return to his native Bulgaria, and when he couldn't do that, he had hoped to marry a woman from his home country.  World events rendered both goals impossible, and so George had to decide if and how and how much he was going to assimilate.  

The autochromes show him working through these questions in real time and reflect the complicated nature of his situation.  Some of them show the Anglo-American fantasy of a cottage garden, while others show his extremely blonde children wearing traditional Bulgarian folk costumes.  Paired with diary entries, letters, and some family financial documents, I will line up primary source documentation with specific images to show how I've tried to understand this man I never met, and how photography helped him understand who he was and who he could be.

Since I have George's equipment, including his camera, original autochrome filter, etc., and I have access to the places and clothing in some of his photographs, I will share some modern autochromes I have shot and processed myself with the help of Jon Hilty, who makes reproduction plates -- and I will line these up with autochromes George took (or, in a couple of cases, related autochromes taken by someone else).  My own personal practice in this regard is about revisiting places, objects, and experiences.  I will also show pictures I took inside of a darkroom while processing a reproduction plate to help people understand the process (which is very simple, it's just black and white reversal, but I think there are some people in the group who won't have seen this).

Biography

Katherine Greenleaf is a student in the MA in Photographic History at De Montfort University, who lives in Chicago, Illinois, USA.  She has worked in the business end of photography since 2015, first at Central Camera, Chicago's oldest camera store, and since 2021 for Film Supply Club, which caters to professional photographers shooting on film.  In addition, Katherine has worked freelance in the Audio Visual Services department at the Art Institute of Chicago since 2019, where she provides support for time-based media installations, including analogue works.  High points of that role have included providing in-gallery projection of Andy Warhol's 16mm films and supporting an installation of Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, among other artworks. Katherine's interest in material photographic histories grew during her work at Central Camera, where she spent a lot of time at the photo finishing counter, and developed further during a short but impactful stint with the National Museum of African American History and Culture's Community Curation program in 2019, where she was part of a team that digitized 25,000 objects, mostly family photographs, in a month.  In her current role at Film Supply Club, Katherine operates major, direct accounts with Kodak and other suppliers, and manages a membership program that supports more than 500 working photographers who make analog film a central part of their practice.  This direct, first-hand view of how the analog ecosystem operates today helps support her research and thinking about the photographic networks of the past.  Katherine is interested in twentieth-century color technology and methods of reproduction.  She is a founding member of a new community darkroom in Chicago, called Safelight Analog Collective.  Katherine is originally from Rochester, New York.  

Designing Photographic Films with Robert L. Shanebrook

Designing photographic films requires identifying the subjective tastes of photographers then making compromises while applying the limited technical tools available to the film designer. Using Kodak PORTRA Film as an example, subjective image evaluation will be described and then the technology that is applied to design and then manufacture the film. 

Robert L. Shanebrook is a graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology and worked at Eastman Kodak Company for 35 years, retiring in 2003. At Kodak, he worked as a commercial photographer, researcher, product development engineer, manufacturing manager, and for over twenty years was a Worldwide Product-Line Manager of Kodak Professional Films. He was involved in nearly all aspects of Kodak’s professional film business. In retirement, he consults in the fields of silver halide technology and photographic history at George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. He is the author of two editions of Making KODAK Film. 

Edgar Alejandro Hernández presents, “The Autochromes of the Mexican Alfredo Saldívar.”

Abstract:  This paper presents the progress of an ongoing doctoral research project on the color work of the Mexican Alfredo Saldívar (1866–1928), a pulque hacienda owner, Porfirian celebrity, and amateur photographer. Between 1914 and 1924, Saldívar produced a vast body of color and black-and-white images that have remained unpublished for more than a century. Two groups from his production survive: 400 autochromes—color positives on glass plates—and 3,000 black-and-white stereoscopic negatives on dry plates. Saldívar’s work was marked by the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution (1910), which sent a significant portion of the Mexican oligarchy—of which he was a member—into exile in Europe. As a result, his images document not only views of Mexico but also numerous European countries, beginning with France, where he resided.

Edgar Alejandro Hernández (Mexico City, 1977) is an editor, researcher, curator, and art critic. He is currently a PhD candidate in Art History at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is the editor and compiler of Ser y devenir: cruzando fronteras y otras barreras by Carla Stellweg; Abuso mutuo by Cuauhtémoc Medina; and El arte de mostrar el arte mexicano by Olivier Debroise. He is co-author of Future Souths: Dialogues on Art, Place and History; Las aventuras de la existencia relativa y otros cuentos (with Wendy Cabrera Rubio); La casa que nos inventamos: Contemporary Art from Guadalajara; Sin límites. Arte contemporáneo en la Ciudad de México 2000–2010; and Déjà vu. Celda Contemporánea 2004/2007. He has curated exhibitions featuring the work of Yoshua Okón, Cristóbal Gracia, Tufic Yazbek, Arturo Talavera, Miguel G. Counahan, Josué Mejía, Rolando López, Daniel Monroy, Julien Devaux, and Javier Barrios. His writing has appeared in The Art Newspaper, Il Giornale dell’Arte, Gatopardo, Letras Libres, Nexos, Chilango, Revista de la Universidad de México, Utopía, Código, Vice, ArtNexus, Ramona, Artishock, Terremoto, Harper’s Bazaar, Forbes, El Universal, Reforma, Excélsior, and the German Press Agency (DPA). He is the director of Revista Cubo Blanco.

From the eerie vision of the owl to the radiant vision of man: Study and conservation-restoration proposal of three tri-color carbon prints by Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, c.1907-1912, by Isaak Cecchetto González

Abstract:

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) is a key figure in the field of neuroanatomy, having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1906 for his pioneering discoveries in the microscopic structure of the nervous system. However, a lesser-known side of his work are his numerous experiments in the field of photography and his many contributions to the literature related to its technical aspects. His works in color, currently on deposit at the National Museum of Natural Science, are mainly composed of autochromes, Lippmann plates and various early pigment and dye-imbibition based processes, both on glass and paper. The pieces this study is based on are three tri-color carbon prints dating between 1907 and 1912. The project will encompass a historical and artistic analysis of the pieces, a study of the technique itself and the physical structure of the prints, and a theoretical approach to their restoration.

Bio 

Isaak Cecchetto is an undergrad in his fourth and final year at the Higher School of Conservation and Restoration of Madrid (Escuela Superior de Conservación y Restauración de Bienes Culturales de Madrid), where he specializes in works on paper, hoping to focus his career on the preservation of photographic materials. His Final Degree Project approaches the restoration of three little-known tri-color carbon prints by Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Fraunhofer spectra – their place in the evolution of photography
By Dr. Alan Hodgson

In the process of writing a book on some aspects of scientific photography the topic of Fraunhofer spectra seems a recurrent theme. The aim of this presentation is to explain the topic for an audience with a broad interest in colour in photography and to discuss areas deserving further research. Colour is a persistent theme in this work, in colour photography, printing and lens design. It takes in the 1848 Becquerel colour process but sets this in context with other contemporary developments in colour work. As an additional historical perspective these spectra reveal hints on the characteristics of photographic plates and create a perspective on the history of photographic imaging science.

Alan Hodgson has a degree in colour chemistry but parked this for a while to go into the monochrome photo industry. 22 years with Ilford Imaging left Alan with a series of questions on the evolution of photographic imaging science that appeared to be unanswered in the literature. He was also left with an appetite to answer these and publish the results. This work forms a part of that quest.

A career in photographic printing has embraced membership of both the Society for Imaging Science & Technology (IS&T) and the Royal Photographic Society. He is a past President of both organisations.

Early Color Processes in Chilean Photography: Archives and Foreign Photographers (1890–1920) 
with Samuel Salgado Tello

This presentation examines early color processes in Chilean photography at the beginning of the twentieth century through the presentation of the archives of León Durandin and Teodoro Kuhlmann and their main characteristics within the Chilean context. Both photographers, of foreign origin, developed a significant part of their work in Chile’s capital, Santiago, and in the country’s main port city, Valparaíso, and their archival holdings today constitute the most important collections of autochromes preserved in Chile. Rather than approaching color solely as a technical advance, the presentation situates it within a cultural, material, and social framework in which technical knowledge circulates, amateur and professional practices coexist, specialized photographic materials become available, and Chile is inserted into transnational networks of photographic production and consumption. 

From this perspective, the archives are understood not merely as repositories of images, but as documentary ensembles that make it possible to reconstruct working methods, conditions of experimentation, and visual expectations associated with color. Between 1890 and 1920, photography in Chile underwent a period of expansion and diversification, marked by the growth of amateur photographic practice, the consolidation of professional studios, and the emergence of spaces of photographic sociability such as competitions, salons, and specialized magazines. This context encouraged technical experimentation and the testing of new procedures, including early color photography. The archive of León Durandin, a French photographer and photographic supplier based in Santiago, is central to understanding this process. In addition to his photographic production, Durandin edited the Manual for Amateurs in 1904, one of the earliest specialized technical publications produced in Chile, and from 1906 onward he was recognized as a pioneer of color photography in the country. His photograph An Ideal Courtyard (1907), reproduced in Zig-Zag magazine, is considered the first color photograph published in Chile. His archive preserves a significant group of Lumière autochromes, which allow an early examination of both the technical possibilities and the aesthetic uses of the process. The archive of Teodoro Kuhlmann, a photographer of German origin active between 1900 and 1940, offers a complementary perspective. His work occupies a space between advanced amateur practice and sustained technical experimentation, with a production linked to stereoscopic photography and the use of color. The presence of autochromes in his archive makes it possible to observe color as a practice of continuous trial, associated with portraits, urban views, and scenes of everyday life. Taken together, these archives invite a reconsideration of the early history of color photography in Chile from an archival and cultural perspective, understanding color not only as a visual attribute, but as a historical problem embedded in practices, materials, and local contexts of use.

Samuel Salgado Tello is a historian, curator, and researcher specializing in the history of photography in Chile and Latin America. Since 2008, he has served as Director of the National Center for Photographic Heritage (Cenfoto-UDP) at Universidad Diego Portales, where he has led major initiatives in the preservation, digitization, and dissemination of photographic archives. His work also extends to the field of digital humanities through projects such as datos.udp.cl and culturadigital.udp.cl. He holds a Master’s degree in History and Cultural Heritage Management and has extensive experience in curatorial practice, archival research, and cultural heritage policy. He has directed numerous research and preservation projects funded by national and international programs, including FONDART, FONDECYT, FMIM, and Fondequip, and has curated exhibitions at major institutions such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Museo de la Memoria, and the Biblioteca Nicanor Parra. Salgado Tello is an active member of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme – Chile, and collaborates with regional and international networks focused on photographic heritage. His publications include books, essays, and editorial projects that explore the intersections of photography, memory, and visual culture. His academic and professional practice is situated at the crossroads of visual history, archival studies, and digital technologies applied to historical research.”

TBA

ONCE AGAIN ITS TIME FOR OUR NOVEMBER SPECIAL: Focus Session
Looking forward to 2026 a new year filled with enthusiasm, inspiration and perspectives on early color photography, Janine & Hanin  will present  an informal session organized as follows:
Janine will open with a short presentation reflecting on this year’s speakers and on how the work of participants in this group contributes to pertinent arguments and to technical and curatorial developments that continue to support the expanding field of research on science, technology and colour photography in the 19th & early 20th Century. After which, we invite you to share your early color photographs, technology and ephemera with the group. People interested in sharing write to us telling us that they would like to share.  Janine will share one of her more unusual color transparencies to open up discussions. 
To conclude the session will be open for questions and discussions in a relaxed setting whilst Hanin poses questions and looks forward to the coming year. This will be a valuable opportunity to get to know each other better, share ideas, pose questions and continue building our color photography community.

See you all at our next meeting!!

Collecting Colour – Autochromes with Hugh Tifft

Hugh’s presentation will be a brief talk about collecting autochromes and other early 3 color photography processes, how he became involved and how the pursuit has changed over time.
We’ll see some examples of plates that have apparently been changed by over scanning.  In addition, we’ll see some interesting anomalies that incur in the process of the autochrome plate. Not everything under the cover glass is bad. We’ll see a few makers marks that have been signed in the plate. A few interesting and rare viewing devices will be included in the presentation.

Biography

Hugh is a photographer, artist, photo educator and collector and consultant for early three-color photography. Following his undergraduate degree in Photography from, The Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hugh earned a master’s degree in photography from Vermont College of Visual Arts, Montpelier, Vermont. Having begun studying photography in the late 1970s, Hugh started collecting early color materials in the early 1980s. He worked for several commercial photographers before opening his own studio for locations and studio photography, and he also began teaching photography in the mid-1990s.

Recommended Reading

• The Art of the Autochrome. The Birth of Color Photography.
  John Wood - University Of Iowa Press.
• The Lumiere Autochrome. History, Technology and Preservation.
  Bertrand Lavedrine and Jean-Paul Gandolfo - The Getty Conservation Institute.
• Twentieth-Century Color Photographs. Identification and Care.
  Sylvie Penichon - The Getty Conservation Institute.
• A Century of Colour Photography from the autochrome to the digital age.
  Pamela Roberts - Andre Deutsch Publisher.
• Photographs of the Past process and preservation
  Bertrand Lavedrine - The Getty Conservation Institute.
• FOUS DE COULEUR
  Autochromes, Les Premieres Photographies Couleur De Suisse (1907-1938)
  Christophe Mauron, Nicolas Crispini, Christophe Dutoit - Musée Gruérien.

On John Joly: Contributions & Enduring Questions
By William Fagan

John Joly (1857-1933), a distinguished Irish polymath and Professor of Geology at Trinity College Dublin, was a pioneering figure in early color photography. This presentation will explore his significant contributions to the field and the enduring questions surrounding his work. The core of the talk will be a close examination of Joly's paper delivered to the Royal Dublin Society on June 26, 1895. In this paper, Joly critically evaluated the work of James Clerk Maxwell and showed a more respectful stance toward Frederic Ives, whose Kromskop viewing device may have been used by Joly himself. The discussion will delve into the technical aspects of Joly's additive color process, including his use of color filters and the challenges of early photographic technology. We will explore unanswered questions about his work, such as whether he used the primary colors red, green, and blue, or other combinations, and if his taking and viewing filters were identical. Joly's brief commercial launch of his process was ultimately overshadowed by later subtractive methods, but his work remains a fascinating enigma, ripe for further exploration. This talk will also feature some of Joly's surviving plates, along with their viewing filters and a viewing device from the Royal Dublin Society.
 

William Fagan is a photography administrator, historian, and collector. He is the Chairperson of Photo Museum Ireland and the incoming President of Leica Society International, as of October 2025. A prolific author, William Fagan has published over 70 articles on cameras and photography, and his talks on topics like early Irish photography and 19th-century darkrooms are popular on YouTube. William Fagan's primary interests are early Irish photography and early Leica cameras.

Reference list

http://www.graphicsatlas.org/guidedtour/?process_id=289#prev
 

http://www.earlyphotography.co.uk/site/gloss11.html
 

http://www.earlyphotography.co.uk/site/entry_I32.html#I146

THE OVERLOOKED AND COLOURFUL CAREER OF R. D. GRAY
By Peter Domankiewicz 

In the January of 1894, Frederic Ives was in the midst of a long sojourn in the UK, lapping up the acclaim for his colour system at one learned society after another, when he had a nasty shock. Back in New York, somebody else was projecting photographs in colour, and reports in both American and British publications said they were better than his. Ives’ wrath was immediately focused on his rival, one R. D. Gray, and he lambasted him in print.

Robert Dempsey Gray (1857-1924) is a figure who has never been profiled in photographic histories,  yet he had a long and outstanding career of innovation in the field of photography, bringing him both a high reputation and material success - from the sales of both products and patent rights. Some credit him with giving birth to street photography in 1885, with his concealed ‘Vest Camera’, marketed under the name of Stirn and sold internationally in huge numbers. He then adapted this technology to enable a cardiologist to capture the pulsations of an animal’s heart for the first time.  He effectively invented the Kodak before Eastman, in 1887. His lenses were acclaimed, with Eastman buying the rights to one of his innovative designs. He patented one of the first moving picture cameras, in the USA and Germany in 1895  – perhaps his only failure. He was commissioned by the US government to make lenses and searchlights.

In this talk, I will give an overview of Gray’s career, focusing particularly (of course) on his work with colour photography and its reproduction between 1892 and 1898. His design of three-colour lantern and his colour images were marketed by J. B. Colt & Co. As well as photographing American landscapes, portraits and still lifes, Gray also made a lengthy trip to Europe in 1894 to capture landmarks in several countries. Gray did not make the claims that Ives did, of truly capturing the colours of nature, preferring to describe his work as “artistic” but the projected results were publicly acclaimed and were at least as (in)accurate. Gray also reproduced these images in printed form as collotypes. Frustratingly, only one surviving colour image is known of, but hopefully this may change if he is discussed more.

And yes, we will find out how he cooly and cleverly defused the threats from Ives.

Peter Domankiewicz is a film director, screenwriter and journalist with a long-standing interest in the origins of cinema. He is currently in the final months of a fully-funded PhD at De Montfort University, examining the work and inventions of the moving picture pioneer and photographer, William Friese-Greene. In 2023 he undertook an AHRC-funded Smithsonian Fellowship at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC, where he carried out a survey of their Early Cinema Collection, drawing attention to several overlooked figures (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDcAolHX_og). His PhD researches have also led him to discover one of the oldest pieces of celluloid moving picture film ever shot. He has written about early film for Sight & Sound and The Guardian, contributed to reference works and journals, and the book he co-authored about the first British commercial filmmaker, Finding Birt Acres, has just been published by the University of Exeter Press. He has given talks at conferences, symposia, film festivals and the British Film Institute’s Southbank cinemas. His blog William Friese-Greene & Me, presents original research on early film history for a broad readership.

The Infamous ‘Tartan Ribbon’ 
The James Clerk Maxwell and Thomas Sutton Saga with Historical Context and Technical Clarifications

By Paul Elter 

May 17, 1861, Jamers Clerk Maxwell delivered a lecture at the Royal Society where he through a lackluster lanternslide projection demonstration, validated his theory for colour perception in the human eye via the additive colour process known today as RGB. Three identical images of Maxwell’s Tartan Ribbon from three separate slide projectors were projected onto the wall of this august society. Chemical compounds in solution were then placed in front of each lens, replicating the ‘colour filters’ with which the object had been photographed by the inventor, writer, publisher and photographer Thomas Sutton – these images were carefully realigned, and that evening “the first colour photograph” was supposed to have been created.  That story is, in fact, a lot more complex and many elements of it have been distorted and misinterpreted through innumerable retellings and have become somewhat of an urban legend – see for yourself as many a photography ‘influencer’ or photographic curator repeats the same factual error over and over.

This is a fascinating story of historical facts buried, distorted and hyped through time and a how a legend arises in such a way to help personal photographic inventors align themselves with hero’s of the scientific and photographic past, warping the truth along the way. Through a lengthy wetplate recreation and scientific experimentation we have discovered what was most likely a happy accident, but not at all any colour firsts, that is to say, not in any way that has been conjectured for over 160 years.  As well, by means of this experiment we can clarify though demonstration, how photographic emulsions ‘see’ the visible colour spectrum and how their nature is biased to portions of that spectrum and cannot ever see beyond them, again sometimes contrary to popular belief and understanding.

This experiment was first conceptualized in the spring of 2021 with my colleague on the project  Dr. Suzanne Klein and has been subsequently peer reviewed in two journals: Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical and in the journal, Heritage. The whole lengthy schamozle can be found on my website blog along with all the links you need, there is so much in there it had to be two parts – enjoy (see below)

Paul Elter: 

A career spanning 35 years in the museum and gallery sector devoted to analog and digital technologies and archiving infrastructures. Paul Elter is an artist, photographer, independent researcher and writer.  The last 22 years of which, he managed and maintained the photographic logistics for digitization of the vast collection at The National Gallery of Canada some 300,000+ works of art including its exceptional photographic collection. Having worked in various capacities in both local and international museums from the Vancouver Art Gallery to the Yukon Art Gallery and during this long career having handled and photographed nearly 85.000 objects and installed numerous local and international exhibitions. Paul is also a wetplate collodion practioner of 20 years and various other photo-historic practices His upcoming publication: Silver Tongued (Fall 2025), is a culmination of itinerate story gathering, wetplate photography and poetry, this 300 page publication is an experiment in the capturing of serendipity and chemistry, of dialogue and the written word, created during a residency at the former home of the Canadian poet Al Purdy. Selected recent writings, lectures and publications, include: Royal Photographic Society Travel & the Mobile Darkroom, Silver, Salt & the Arctic Ocean (2020), Colour Fever Symposium at the Victoria & Albert Museum London, England: – Maxwell’s Disappointment / Sutton’s Accident (2021) Victoria & Albert Museum Dundee Scotland – Exhibition, Tartan (2023-24) Writer-in-Residence - Al & Eurithe Purdy A-Frame Ameliasburgh, ON (2023). Another Places Press UK (2023), Arctic Light – Field Notes 063. The cover image to: AnyWord – A Festschrift for Phil Hall (2024), Beautiful Outlaw Press CDN. Winner of the Yukon Advanced Artist Award, (2000) and Canada Council for the Arts, Creation and Exploration Award (2023). Currently residing in the beautiful Gatineau hills in Chelsea, Quebec Canada. 

More reading material: 

https://www.elter.ca/alizarin/2021/12/7/maxwells-first-colour-photograph-part-one

https://www.elter.ca/alizarin/2021/12/7/ebkt9istvpqp3bnhzk3sn5q1l78wvg

Identifying Finlay Color Photographs within the Matson Photograph Collection with Jan Hubička  

The G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, housed at the Library of Congress, comprises a rich collection of photographs taken by the American Colony Photo Department and Matson Photo Service between 1898 and 1946. While the photographers were based in Jerusalem, the collection documents numerous locations across the Middle East and parts of Africa.

The collection was digitized in 2004-2005 by JJT, Inc. using an overhead Sinar 54 camera, capturing images at a high resolution for the time (approximately 5000 pixels on the long edge). All scans are available online at their full resolution.

In this talk, I will focus on the discovery of Finlay color negatives and transparencies within this archive. These were first noted in 2011 by Mark Jacobs, motivating work on the open-source tool Color-Screen, designed to reconstruct color from regular color screen processes used in early color photography. Recently, the Library of Congress re-scanned three selected negatives using a modern setup, revealing their full potential.

We believe we have all tools necessary to turn all Finlays in the collection into high-quality color photographs, and towards that, I implemented an automated tool ("robot FiFin") to FInd all FINlay plates in the digitized Matson Photograph Collection. Negatives and transparencies of Finlay color photographs, when not registered with their viewing screens, appear monochromatic and are nearly indistinguishable from standard black-and-white photographs to the naked eye. FiFin utilizes Fourier analysis to detect regularly repeating patterns characteristic of screen processes within the scans. Searching the Matson photograph collection catalog for "Finlay color" yields 189 results, not all of which were real color images. Manual attempts to find additional color images in the digital collection (over 22,000 negatives) were unsuccessful; however, FiFin analyzed the collection over 10 days (bounded by the download speed) and found 461 Finlay color photographs and 7 Dufaycolors.

I plan to cover the following topics:
 - A (very) brief introduction to the American Colony and their photographers.
 - An explanation of the Finlay color process and the progress made in digitally converting these negatives into color positives that approximate the original viewing experience achievable with the intended viewing screens.

•  A comparison of color reconstructions using the 2005 scans versus those based on the new, higher-quality scans.
• Discussion on digitizing Finlay color negatives and transparencies
• A discussion of FiFin
• A showcase of selected color photographs discovered, many of which were originally intended for publication in National Geographic Magazine. These relate to at least four articles:

1. Petra, Ancient Caravan Stronghold (Feb. 1935)
2. Bedouin Life in Bible Lands (Jan. 1937)
3. Where Early Christians Lived… (Dec. 1939), about ancient monasteries in Cappadocia, Turkey
4. Canoeing Down the Jordan (Dec. 1940) The largest set of photographs, however, was taken during a trip to the sources of the Nile, and the intended use of these images currently remains unclear.

I hope FiFin will be useful to find more early color photographs in large collections, and I hope in the follow-up discussion we can identify good candidates for further exploration.

I would like to thank the staff (both current and former) of the Library of Congress, in particular Lynn Brooks, Micah Messenheimer, Phil Mitchel, Thomas Rieger, and Helena Zinkham, for the amazing work that made this research possible. I am grateful for the opportunity to view the original photographs and for receiving new, high-quality scans of sample negatives.

 

Biography

Jan Hubička  is following on from his presentation to the group on Tuesday, February 20, 2024 on Understanding Colors of Dufaycolor  and Tuesday, December 19, 2023 when he spoke on Digitizing Paget, Finlay and Dufaycolor photographs at National Geographic Society.  He is an associate professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics, software developer at SUSE LINUX s.r.o. and also a co-founder and a co-director of Šechtl and Voseček Museum of Photography in Tábor, Czech Republic. His interest in early color photography was sparked by Autochromes taken by his great grandfather, Josef Jindřich Šechtl. In 2006 he organized exhibition of early color photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky (first in Europe except for Moscow) for which he made his own tool composing scans of the separation negatives. In 2007 he organized exhibition of (reproductions of) Czech Autochromes which got him into contact with American collector of early color photography, Mark Jacobs. He helped to digitize important part of Mark Jacobs' collection and in 2012 organized exhibition “When the World Turned to Color Early Color Photography from the Mark Jacobs Collection”. Work on regular color screen processes started in 2011 for exhibition of photographs from the American Colony Collection where Mark Jacobs identified negatives for Finlay color process. He also co-organized two international workshops on early color photography, "Legacy of three-color photography" in 2008 and "Space, Color, Motion" in 2013.

Literature

•  Web resources:
  • Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection (Prints and Photographs collections, Library of Congress)
    https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/matpc/colony.html
    Catalogue of the Matson Photograph Collection with access to all high-resolution scans.  Search for "Finlay color negative"
  • Digitizing the collection
    https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/matpc/digitizing.html
    Information about digitization of the Matson Photograph Collection provided by the Library of Congress
  • American Colony in Jeursalem, 1870 to 2006 (Digital Collections, Library of Congress)
    https://www.loc.gov/collections/american-colony-in-jerusalem/about-this-collection/
    A rich source of digitized documents concerning the American Colony
  • Color-Screen Wiki
    https://github.com/janhubicka/Color-Screen/wiki
    Webpage of our project; still under construction.
  • Timeline of Historical Color Photography and Film: Finlay Positive Color Screen / Finlaychrome
    https://filmcolors.org/timeline-entry/39408/
• Publications:
  • Tom Powers: Jerusalem’s American Colony and Its Photographic Legacy
    https://israelpalestineguide.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/jerusalems_american_colony-_its_photographic_legacy.pdf
  • Geoffrey Barker, Jan Hubička, Mark Jacobs, Linda Kimrová, Kendra Meyer, Doug Peterson: Finlay, Thames, Dufay, and Paget color screen process collections: Using digital registration of viewing screens to reveal original color, 2nd Edition of the Conference “Colour Photography and Film: analysis, preservation, and conservation of analogue and digital materials” 2022
    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.16076
  • Jan Hubička, Linda Kimrová, Kensi Klaeser, Sara Manco, Doug Peterson. Digital analysis of early color photographs taken using regular color screen processes, Color and Colorimetry Multidisciplinary Contributions 17 (2023), 241-248
    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.09631
  • Linda Kimrová. Digital processing of early colour photography, Bachelor thesis, defended 2024.
    https://dspace.cuni.cz/discover?scope=%2F&query=Kimrov%C3%A1&submit=

Jan Hubička, Linda Kimrová, Melichar Konečný: Understanding colors of Dufaycolor: Can we recover them using historical colorimetric and spectral data?, arXiv:2501.06216v1
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06216v1

Spectral Colors: Peeping and Projecting Spectacular Reality, 1890–1920s

Frederic E. Ives (American, 1856-1937) first patented a composite three-color photographic process called the Krōmskōp Photochromoscope in 1894. This presentation will provide an outline of Ives and his various 3-color composite color devices, both stereographic and its projection counterpart, as he attempted to commercialize the Krōmskōp in the United States and in Britain in the 1890s. This so-called “Natural Color” process was exceedingly complex and hardly practicable for most amateurs. Yet, Ives’s Krōmskōp is productively viewed as a case study to consider the relationship between reality and fantasy in the color image as it was experienced in the enclosed color stereoscopic, and its translation as a projected, synthesized color image in collective viewing occasions. Recasting the familiar as spectacular and the fantastic as tangibly real, the spectral arrangements of red, green, and blue filters configured by lantern projectors and stereoscopic viewers presented its image as an event experienced in space and time with its viewer. 

Rachel Lee Hutcheson, PhD is a Lecturer at Columbia University and Cooper Union in New York. Her research interests include histories of photography, film and video, and media theory. Her dissertation, “Natural Color Photography, 1890-1920: Technology, Gender, Colonialism,” engages with the relationship between color, color vision, and photo-filmic technology at the turn of the twentieth century. Part of this research has been published in Grey Room (Summer, 2024) and 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (Summer, 2025); her writing on contemporary art has appeared in Millennium Film Journal. She has presented her work at the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, the European Research Council project Chromotope, and at the IKKM in Weimar, Germany. Rachel is presenting on color stereography at the upcoming 34th International Panorama Council Conference in Lisbon. Her research has been supported by the Library of Congress, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Mellon Humanities International Travel Fellowship. She has degrees from Virginia Commonwealth University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Suggested Reading:

Rachel Wetzel, “Instinctive Genius: Frederic Eugene Ives & The Krōmscōp Color Photography    System,” Photo-Researcher 37 (2022), 40-55.

Rachel Hutcheson, “Coming Attraction: The Event of Color, Techniques of Screening and Filtering in Early “Natural” Color Film and Photography,” Grey Room 96 (2024), 6-29.

Painterly Still Lifes and Belle Époque Aesthetics in Finland – Wladimir Schohin’s Autochromes

Wladimir Schohin (1862–1934) was a Finnish-born Russian merchant as well as Finland’s most accomplished pictorialist and autochromist. Schohin could be described as a well-kept secret in the history of color photography, as not much is known about him and even less has been written in English. In one of the only English treatises on Schohin from 1993 John Wood went as far as to write: “-- on the basis of his autochrome work alone [Schohin] could be considered one of the greatest photographers of the century.” The majority of Schohin’s surviving autochromes were donated to the Finnish Museum of Photography by Finland’s oldest photoclub AFK in 2024. The museum’s curator of collections Max Fritze lays out the context of early Finnish photographic art and presents select autochromes from the collection.

Max Fritze (b. 1988) is a Finnish art historian. He has been a curator of collections at the Finnish Museum of Photography since 2019. Fritze is especially interested in discourses surrounding early Finnish photographic art. He has researched Finnish pictorialism and published several texts on the topic, most notably Ideas about Ennobled Photography: Pictorialism in Finland, 1897–1930 (abstract in English) in The Finnish Museum of Photography’s publication Piktorialismi – Valokuvataiteen synty (Pictorialism – the Dawn of Photographic art), 2022.

Reading material on Schohin in English:

• Wood, John: The art of the Autochrome – The Birth of Color Photography, 1993. Iowa City : University of Iowa press. p. 41–43.
• Carpelan, Bert: Wladimir Schohin: an Early Color Master. The Frozen Image – Scandinavian Photography, 1982. Walker Art Center. - New York : Abbeville. p.120–123.

Online reading material in Finnish (feel free to use Deepl to translate them):

• Frigård, Johanna: Autochrome-kuumeen epikriisi, 2014. Tahiti 2/2014.
• Wladimir Schohin at the Finnish National Biography website
• Wladimir Schohin’s Autochromes. Website of the Finnish Museum of Photography.

“I never understood his hate”:  Arthur Traube’s Uvachrome in Europe and Beyond 
A talk by Dr. Hanin Hannouch (Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna), dedicated to the memory of the late Mark Jacobs. 

In one of his letters to his colleague German photochemist and would-be Nazi historian Erich Stenger (1878-1957), German Jewish photochemist Arthur Traube (1852-1956) describes his relationship to his teacher Adolf Miethe (1862-1927) saying “I never understood his hate”. Known for having co-patented panchromatic sensitization in 1902 together with Miethe, Traube seems to have all but swiftly disappeared from the history of color photography. 
Relying on extant primary sources and photography collections scattered across Europe, my new research project not only centers on Traube’s oeuvre, positioning him as a photochemist and entrepreneur in his own right, but also on his life as Jewish scientist who only survived thanks to his hurried exile to the USA. My talk starts by elucidating Traube’s life and studies in Berlin, seeing them also through the prism of his Jewishness and the hate he faced as a result. I will also explicate his use of dye mordanting in two of his photographic processes, Diachromie as of 1906 and Uvachrome as of 1922, focusing on the three Uvachrome companies he was involved in to various degrees (in Munich, Vienna, and Biel). Then, I will reveal what happened to Uvachrome, both the technology and the brand, after Traube was forced to move to the other side of the Atlantic. 

A greater understandings of colour objects in museum and heritage collections: Digitising Autochromes
The Autochrome Lumière was the first commercially successful colour photography process. Autochromes pose many conservation considerations. Notably, autochromes are highly light sensitive and the colours are prone to fading. For these reasons, many international public institutions do not display their autochrome collections and instead exhibit facsimile copies. There are also restrictions around public access and digitisation processes. These practices underscore the need for non-invasive methods to provide public access and insight without compromising preservation.
The EU project PERCEIVE (http://perceive-horizon.eu http://perceive-horizon.eu/>) seeks to form greater understandings of colour objects in museum and heritage collections. The V&A’s collection of over two thousand autochrome plates is the basis for a study looking at early colour photography. At the Colourlab at NTNU, spectral imaging is being used to separate the overlapping visual elements of autochrome plates—the optical properties of color dyes and the photographic image itself. This information will be used for a range of results, which will include the virtual restoration of damaged autochromes and a consideration of the potential of digital heritage.
To conclude, we will discuss our survey of current digitisation practices relating to autochromes. This information will inform ways to address the unique obstacles that autochrome plates presents in terms of their digitisation.
Speakers:

• Giorgio Trumpy: Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (https://www.ntnu.edu/colourlab#/view/about) and founding member of Scan2Screen GmbH (scan2screen.com http://scan2screen.com/>). Imaging Scientist with solid experience in bridging the gap between art and science. Fields of expertise span from optics to spectroscopy, from colorimetry to image processing, from heritage conservation to visual arts.
• Catlin Langford: Curator, writer and researcher specialising in photography. She has held curatorial and teaching positions at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Collection Trust, and Royal College of Art. Her debut publication ‘Colour Mania: Photographing the World in Autochrome’ (Thames & Hudson/V&A) was published in 2022. She is presently working with the V&A’s autochrome collection as part of PERCEIVE.

We (Janine + Hanin) are going on a break this December and will be back with a vengeance in January 2026. As a present to the members of this exciting, energizing, and downright colorful working group, we are preparing a giveaway game. So stay tuned to the newsletters we send you and who knows what Santa Clause will be sending you this holiday season!
We look forward to seeing you all in January and to enjoy a wonderful new year together filled with niche color processes, even nich-er scientists and off-the-beaten-track collections.

Group hugs from Vienna + Oxford,
Hanin + Janine

NOVEMBER SPECIAL: Focus Session
Looking forward to 2025 a new year filled with enthusiasm, inspiration and perspectives on early color photography, Hanin  & Janine will present  an informal session organized as follows:
We will open with a short presentation reflecting how participants in this group and their work point towards poignant and pertinent arguments expanding field of research of science, technology and color photography in the 19th & early 20th Century.
After which, we invite you to share your early color photographs and ephemera with the group.  People interested in sharing write to us telling us that they would like to share and what they would like to share.
After which, the session will be open for questions and discussions in a relaxed setting whilst Hanin poses questions and tells her jokes. This will be a valuable opportunity to get to know each other better and continue building our color photography community.