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.
