CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Color Photography
Photographs that record hue as well as tone, from Autochrome plates and dye-transfer prints to large chromogenic and digital prints.
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About
Colour photography records hue as well as tone, and for its first century it was a technical puzzle. James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated three-colour separation with a tartan ribbon in 1861. The Lumière brothers' Autochrome plates, launched in 1907, used dyed starch grains to produce glowing, slightly speckled images, and Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky photographed the Russian Empire through red, green and blue filters around 1910.
Even after colour film became affordable, many serious photographers distrusted it as commercial. Saul Leiter's softly blurred New York street pictures of the 1950s and the colour work of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore in the 1970s changed that, finding interest in petrol stations, diners and ordinary rooms. Large chromogenic prints by Andreas Gursky and others later gave photographs the scale of paintings. Process leaves traces: Autochromes shimmer, dye-transfer colour is dense, and older chromogenic prints often drift towards red or magenta as their dyes fade.
Related artists
More in Medium and Techniques
Color Theory
Computer-Aided Manufacturing
Copies and Emulations
Delicate Materials
Densely Textured or Haptic Surface
Digital Art
Digital as Manual
Digital Painting and Drawing
Digital Print
Digitally Manipulated
Divinatory Objects, Talismans, and Amulets
Documentary Photography
