Use of colour

Abstract

The search for a direct colour-sensitive medium continued after black-and-white photography was brought to a workable point, satisfying the needs of art and commercial use for the time. 1 In 1891 Gabriel Lippman, professor of physics at Sarbonne, perfected his interference process (Newhall, 1982: 272) . Edward Steichen wrote a letter to Alfred Steiglitz in 1908, telling him that "Professor Lippmann has shown me slides of still-life subjects by projection that was as perfect in colour as in an ordinary glass-positive in the rendering of the image in monochrome. The rendering of the slide tones was astonishing, and a slide made by one of the Lumiere brothers, at a time when they were trying to make the process commercially possible, a slide of a girl in a plain dress on a brilliant sunlighted lawn was simply dazzling, and one would have to go to a good Renoid to find its equal in colour luminosity" (Newhall, 1982: 272). Even though Lippman's process was not practical, two things between Steichen and Steiglitz became evident, namely the words "commercially possible" and "colour luminosity". This is important for me as photographer. The art of photography is in seeing and pre-visualizing your result. Colour is a commercial means to keep on commercial ising it in a photograph, the photographer should exploit its possibilities. Leopold GOldowsky junior and Leopold Mannes (researchers at the Eastman Company) became the first if only by a few months to produce a workable modern system of taking pictures in colour (Colour, 1976: 54). One of the strangest facts about colour photography is that, while a method that was both simple and effective was not developed until 1935, yet fairly good pictures could be taken as early as 1868 (Colour, 1976: 54). This convinces me that colour photography is a commercial process that could be used in an artistic way, and not an artistic process that could be used commercially, l ike in the case of black and white photography and painting.