The Colors of Photography 9783110661484, 9783110650280

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The Colors of Photography

Studies in Theory and History of Photography Vol. 10 Publication Series of the Center for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography (TGF) at the Department of Art History, University of Zurich Edited by Bettina Gockel International Advisory Board Michel Frizot Emeritus Director of Research at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris Robin Kelsey Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography, Department of History of Art & Architecture, Harvard University Wolfgang Kemp Emeritus Professor of Art History, Institute of Art History, University of Hamburg Charlotte Klonk Professor of Art and New Media, Institute of Art History and Visual Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin Shelley Rice Arts Professor, Department of Photography and Imaging and Department  of Art History, New York University Anna Tellgren Curator, Ph. D., of Photography at Moderna Museet, Stockholm Kelley Wilder Professor of Photographic History, Director of the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester Herta Wolf Professor of History and Theory of Photography, Institute of Art History, University of Cologne Andrés Mario Zervigón Professor of the History of Photography, Department of Art History, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

The Colors of Photography Edited by Bettina Gockel IN COLLABORATION WITH NADINE JIRKA AND STELLA JUNGMANN

Printed with generous financial support from the Dr. Carlo Fleischmann Foundation (www.dcff.org) in Zurich and from the Dr. h. c. Kaspar M. Fleischmann Project to Support Research on Photography at the Chair for the History of Fine Arts, Department of Art History at the University of Zurich This publication is based on the conference “The Colors of Photography” held at the University of Zurich in autumn 2015, organized by the Center for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography at the Department of Art History. For information on the activities organized by the Center for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography, visit photographyzurich.ch. This volume is dedicated to commemorating the 75th birthday of Dr. h. c. Kaspar M. Fleischmann.

ISBN 978-3-11-065028-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-066148-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943489 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at http://dnb.dnb.de © 2020 Walter De Gruyter GmbH Berlin/Boston © Cover: Omar Victor Diop, Frédérick Douglass – series “Diaspora”, 2015, ink jet print, 90 × 90 cm, © Omar Victor Diop, courtesy gallery MAGNIN-A, Paris. Every attempt has been made to trace and correctly acknowledge all relevant copyright holders. Should inaccuracies or ommissions have occurred, however, the publisher would kindly ask any affected parties to contact our office in order that we may make corrections. Translations: Michael Thomas Taylor (together with Anthony Heric for Bettina Gockel’s ­contribution concerning Hans Danuser’s insert), Anthony Heric for Foreword and Thanks, Ryan Eyers and Joel Scott (for Gegensatz Translation Collective) for Bettina Gockel’s essay and introduction Copyediting: Bettina Gockel, Nadine Jirka, Stella Jungmann, Penelope Krumm, Michael Thomas Taylor, and Ryan Eyers Photo Editing: Nadine Jirka, Stella Jungmann Graphic Design: Petra Florath, Stralsund Lithography, Printing, and Binding: DZA Druckerei zu Altenburg GmbH, Altenburg www.degruyter.com

Contents



    7 Foreword. The Making of this Book: Why “The Colors of Photography”?    19

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

   55

Tanya Sheehan Color Matters: Rethinking Photography and Race

   73

Deborah Willis Encounters with Color Photography

   95

Blake Stimson The Color of Photography: The Covenant of Paul Strand



  123 Insert Hans Danuser The Mount Fuji of Davos. Part of the Series “Matographs and Volcanoes” 1996–2018   173 Bettina Gockel Uncalibrated: From the Standpoint of Color—Hans Danuser   201

Kim Timby The Colors of Black-and-White Photography

  231 Insert Raymond Meier The Art & Technique of Commissioned Photography

  253 CHARLOTTE COTTON An Interview with Raymond Meier   261

BETTINA GOCKEL The Invention of Black-and-White Photography: Proclamations of Photography’s Aesthetic Independence and the History of Photography’s Colors

  307 Kelley Wilder Science, Art, and the Business of Color   327

List of Contributors

  331

Thanks

Foreword The Making of this Book: Why “The Colors of Photography”?

The history of photography—unlike the development of theories about photography—is still astonishingly circumscribed by national and monographic narratives, even though by now there has been critical and problem-oriented research. In the run-up to the conference that took place at the University of Zurich in October 2015 (fig. 1), this led to the following considerations: which topic would allow a different

1: Flyer of the conference The Colors of Photography, 2015.

approach to be taken without simply borrowing from the established research areas of art history, which topic would not just isolate photography’s medium specificity once again but would instead emphasize photography’s intermediality and contextuality (meaning the connections between image, art and word, industry and aesthetic, commerce and pleasure, politics and ethics) historically, theoretically and in terms of its aesthetic reception?1 What element of photography—and not photography as

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a whole or a particular historic period of photography—could be particularly well suited for helping to understand this complex, a complex constituted of interstices of mediality, of materiality and practices that incorporate specific actors and participants as well as discourses and theories? “The Colors of Photography” appeared to be the answer to these questions. Color and colorfulness have long been researched in art history in the Germanspeaking world under the notion of Koloritgeschichte, but without this area having really differentiated itself systematically in terms of terminology and content. The reason for the lack of systematics and acuity of definition lies in the hermeneutic approach to color as a phenomenon of painting, an approach that is often subjectively empathetic as a consequence. Color as material and technique is therefore less examined in historical and cultural contexts, whereas the history of color theories, in contrast, is very precise, that is to say objectified, in both past and present research. Moreover, research on the histories of the theories, materials and practices of color are seldom linked to one another—knowledge about art technology and art history often drift apart—even as individual research is quite advanced. Yet transferring these research results onto photography lacks intermedial and interdisciplinary viewpoints, which would have to be reflected in a strict and methodical manner. Nonetheless, what can be learned from the art history of color with regard to all other pictorial media is the following: color is a very special challenge for the historical sciences. This isn’t as trite an observation as it may seem, because the methodologically important conclusion that can be drawn from this observation is that it is in no way “medium specific” that color and photography have remained a difficult topic for the humanities to this day. It goes without saying that a historic exploration of the dimensions of color in photography is an important desideratum for historical epistemology, especially in the natural sciences. In other words, “The Colors of Photography” is a specific, tangible and far-reaching field of research— prompted not least by the technological dynamism and thought-provoking intellectual impulses of the digital humanities—that currently appears to have reached a new starting point. This is why it seemed worthwhile to try to put together a small conference as part of a special occasion that would attempt to take a few initial steps towards advancing research into “The Colors of Photography”—focusing not on the history of color photography but instead on the problematization of color in photography. No more, but also no less. Along with the conference’s presentations, historic photo objects were shown in the auditorium of the former College of Education on Rämistrasse 59 in Zurich, which had recently been renovated for the university. The exhibition objects from the field of early photography were intended to illustrate the fact that color can be understood as a phenomenon that was essential for the various aesthetic and technical variations of photography long before the technical invention of color photography. Yet this

Foreword

clear finding of the aesthetics and technique of color in photography forms nothing less than the foundation for researching a phenomenon that permeates the history of photography on many interwoven levels to this day: color isn’t just an aesthetic and technical matter, but it requires knowledge of these foundations of what color in photography was, what it is and discursively became. Only on the basis of this finding can new questions be developed for research into “The Colors of Photography.” Among the historic photo objects on display were several from the New York gallery and collection of Hans P. Kraus, Jr., illustrating for instance the intense blue of Anna Atkins’s (English, 1799–1897) cyanotypes (figs. 2, 3) from her book British Algae,2 or showing the varied hues of hand-colored albumen prints. In addition, there were a variety of further examples of early photography that show aspects of color from this collection (figs. 4–8). All of these techniques and their aesthetic effects are enjoying a revival in contemporary art photography, for instance in the works of Julian Schnabel, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Cornelia Parker.3

2: Anna Atkins, Halymenia furcellata from British Algae Vol. I., 1843–1850, cyanotype photogram, handwritten title within the plate, 25.9 × 20.4 cm, courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York. 3: Anna Atkins, Cover of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, Vol. I, 1843-1850, album pages each approx. 26.0 × 20.5 cm, untrimmed, handwritten titles within the plates, and inserted manuscript notice in ink by Atkins, courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York.

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Foreword

4: Kusakabe Kimbei (attr.), Martial Arts, 1880s, hand-colored albumen print, 26.3 × 20.8 cm mounted on 35.0 × 27.0 cm card, courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York. 5: Rev. Calvert Richard Jones, Soldiers in formation, Naples, 1847, hand-colored salt print from a calotype negative, 15.3 × 19.9 cm, courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York. 6: Nevil Story-Maskelyne, Magdalen College, Oxford (Schaaf 4465), 1840s, calotype negative, 20.7 × 15.2 cm, courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York.

Foreword

7: William Henry Fox Talbot, Lesser meadow-rue (Thalictrum minus) (Schaaf 3663), probably early 1839, photogenic drawing negative, 22.5 × 18.3 cm tipped onto 28.6 × 21.8 cm paper, courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York. 8: William Henry Fox Talbot, Lace (Schaaf 2818), early 1840s, salt print from a photogenic drawing negative, 22.7 × 18.7 cm on 22.9 × 18.8 cm paper, courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York. 9: Unknown photographer, Still life with peaches, ca. 1913, raydex color process print, 7.1 × 13.9 cm mounted on 11.1 × 17.7 cm paper mounted on 18.7 × 25.9 cm card, courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York. 10: Unknown photographer, Still life with plums, apples and pears, ca. 1913, raydex color process print, 7.5 × 13.5 cm mounted on 11.6 × 17.3 cm paper mounted on 18.8 × 25.4 cm card, courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York.

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Foreword

It was even possible to show historically very short-lived color photography methods, such as Raydex, with the presentation of two still lifes from about 1913 (figs. 9, 10).4 The highly light-sensitive objects were displayed in showcases covered with fabric during the presentations. Only during the breaks were glimpses of these precious objects permitted. Thus color as a material component of photographic ­images could be conveyed to the broader audience of the public conference as another factor increasing the fragility of photography. The objects from the private collection of Kim Timby, who also contributed an essay to this book and took part in the conference as a discussant, drew a connection to the popular and entertaining use of color in 3D photography, a topic thoroughly discussed in her dissertation.5 Timby researched the phenomenon of the 3D image in a photo-historic manner and with a special focus on color, pursuing the desire of photographers and viewers for

11: Anonymous, Portrait of a woman with a fan, 1940s, Kim Timby private collection, courtesy of Kim Timby.

Foreword

12: Roger Salloch, Paris Dreaming, 2006, Pentax, 35 mm. “Take a shape, color is charcoal. Black holds things together, sculpts reality, spells words. Black is three dimensional. White leaves room for feelings, for an exchange, pulls words together, seeks meaning. A black and white photograph wants the dream, the green path through the woods in the middle of the winter. Black and white images take us deeper into ourselves, and into others, if we want to go.” (Extract from “Into the Light,” a new short story by Roger Salloch) 

“­ natural” chromatic colors that correspond to human perception (fig. 11). Timby’s selection of objects additionally set an important accent for the conference: it was not only about photography as art. Rather, the conference was intended to highlight potential new topics on and research areas into the phenomenon of color from all areas of photography—art, culture, society, business, science, politics—as well as the category of black-and-white photography. The chronology of the history of color photography was largely ignored, even though this established narrative was considered a separate object of investigation in a historiography that has meanwhile been problematized many times over. The selection of the presenters was guided by the desire to give the conference a North American focus by mainly choosing experts and themes from a country that identifies with the medium of photography like perhaps no other in the world, given that this pictorial technique was thought to be lacking in tradition, radically new and modern.6 In the small exhibition, the photographs of the American writer and photographer Roger Salloch (fig. 12), who lives in Paris, represented traditional black-

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and-white photography in the style of Cartier-Bresson.7 Salloch, who was invited as a discussant like the US-born Timby, wrote an equal parts personal and literary statement for the conference: “[…] Digital photography allows one to take pictures of what one wants to see. Analog is ruthless. You take pictures of what you see. Digital is closer to writing, one can explore the flow of memories, look for the ‘real’ shape of last night’s dream. Analog is absolute. This is what the world is made of, these stones, these bricks of light and dark, these suggestions of where the colors might be. Color is an affair of the brain. Your blue is not my blue. But architecture shapes the world through which we move. My wall is your wall too. My brutal landscape is your brutal landscape too. An instant of composition makes it possible, easier, even more fun, to visualize the colors our brains are telling us about. Black is form, shadows, charcoal lines come to life. Black holds things together, white suggests what might be there, on the other side of the open door. It constitutes the narrative, and the feelings, the desires and the dreams, the green leaves of spring in winter, and the full moon of that morning when… Of course, it is not always easy just to walk through an open door. Susan Sontag has written that for her, photography is a constant return to what has been. I would like to suggest another possibility: Suppose photography were an advance. Suppose light could be accumulated, one square of light leading to the next and then to another, stepping stones of light across the shadows until finally, there was enough, a constant progress in the images until what is in shadows is left behind, and ahead of you, everything else slowly becomes visible. The river has deepened but you never look back.” To this day, a majority of the general public still associates the striking and therefore memorable manifestation of the black-and-white image with aesthetically superior artistic photography. However, there’s been hardly any examination of the moreor-less juxtaposed tracks of color and black-and-white photography in their historical discursivity, the legendary narratives, their institutional histories and the relations inherent in the works. For instance, illuminating cases such as Ellsworth Kelly’s representational black-and-white photographs, which were important for his abstract painting, were only recently discovered and explored (fig. 13). The interplay between the exhibited objects and the presentations during the conference could not be preserved for this book. We hope that one point nevertheless remains clear in its essays: that the study of the material object is what leads to the epistemological object, particularly in the digital era.

Foreword

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13: Ellsworth Kelly, Hangar Doorway, St. Barthélemy, 1977, gelatin silver print, 22.0 × 32.0 cm, © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Sally A. Stein’s contribution to the conference, which was titled “‘Pretty in Pink’ or ‘Pretty Poison’? Modern Color Photography’s Market Sources & Environmental Consequences,” was unavailable for the book but discussed an aspect that has scarcely been examined to date: namely, the consequences that the globally industrialized production of color for photography has for the environment and therefore also for the climate. Instead of asking for more written contributions, it seemed to make more sense to supplement the essays with two artistic pieces that present current experiments and movements of digital color photography. Two photographers—Hans Danuser and Raymond Meier—are each represented with a series of their own choosing and additional explanatory texts.8 The texts—an essay and an interview—were prepared by the photographers in conversations with the two authors. In their respective oeuvres, Danuser and Meier—the one as an artist, the other as an advertising and fashion photographer—have processed the experience of change from analog to digital photography. Both have worked with mixed techniques and hybrid processes, thus making it particularly clear that the so frequently invoked paradigm shift from analog to digital must be examined in just as differentiated a manner as the so often proclaimed new beginnings and ends of photography. Yes, it is actually the case that photography as an experiential medium is characterized by a contingency that can be historically contextualized. Beginning and end, change, old and new are to be

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understood in relation to historically malleable perception. The desire to force these elements into a causally stringent narration with a step-by-step order is not terribly informative, which is precisely what the theme of color in photography makes clear. Danuser and Meier, as photographers who have a genuine interest in color, can show by way of example that color is ultimately (and always has been) suitable for photographic work in a hybrid setting. As a result, color has not remained a kind of utopia of the medium. Moreover, taking both Danuser’s and Meier’s work into account makes us aware that familiar distinctions such as art vs. business, or photography vs. commercial images, are not very productive when it comes to investigating “The Colors of Photography” in a fresh manner.9 The marketing of photography’s materials alone—paper, chemicals, equipment— has barely been considered for the “business” of photography and its research as of yet. The demarcation between art and commerce has to do with categories that are important for the art market, categories that are used merely to generate symbolic value, as Abigail Solomon-Godeau showed. Individual artists, groups of artists and museums also continue to build their myths and legends, although that’s not all they’re building, on categories of creative invention, pure idea and chance—all imagined with the greatest possible distance to business and marketing. Yet there is more and more frequently a commingling of art and commerce, freelance photography and commissioned works, which has meant that art museums increasingly have to cope with such hybrid concepts. From this perspective, it seems very long ago that Moholy-Nagy vehemently raised black-and-white photography up to the status of an idiom at Bauhaus, to then later experiment with color in exile in Amsterdam and realize advertising commissions in color in London.10 The international Bauhaus style as represented and disseminated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Bauhaus exiles in the United States is still identified to this day with the black-andwhite aesthetic of Modernism, even though intensive discussions about the relationships between basic colors and basic forms at Bauhaus do not confirm the aesthetic dominance of black-and-white in Bauhaus’s practice and theory.11 The case of Walker Evans shows that color(fulness) did not fit in with the legend formation and aesthetic individuation of the creative pictorial medium of “photography,” which wanted to be radically modern. Evans was a true figurehead of traditional black-and-white photography. His colorful Polaroids from the 1970s received a very positive, if very late, reception, but then in the context of digital photography, while Evans himself remained an advocate for black-and-white photography when he said that no photographer should experiment with color before the age of sixty.12 In terms of the history of the medium, the “digital revolution” is probably the most important event for being able to historically understand the relationship between black-and-white and color in photography in all of its facets. It would be a worth­while undertaking to systematically examine many of these historical cases

Foreword

for their doctrine of black-and-white photography, thus revealing the functions of this doctrine within national and international narratives as well as the works’ immanent foundations of meaning and concepts. This book aims to initiate by way of example such a systematic approach toward specifically defined topics. It presents interventions into “The Colors of Photography” research field to show that “color” is much more than a matter of technique and aesthetics.13 Bettina Gockel    Zurich, October 2020

Notes   1 On the methods and theory of intermediality, see for instance: Gabriele Rippl, ed., Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music, Handbooks of English and American Studies: Text and Theory 1 (Berlin; Boston: DeGruyter, 2015); Corina Caduff et al., eds., Die Künste im Gespräch: Zum Verhältnis von Kunst, Musik, Literatur und Film (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007).   2 See Larry J. Schaaf, Sun Gardens. Cyanotypes by Anna Atkins, ed. Joshua Chuang, with contributions by Joshua Chuang, Emily Walz and Mike Ware (Munich; London; New York: Prestel, 2018).   3 See the Hans P. Kraus Jr. Gallery, which specializes in early photography and pictorialism and fine art photography overall, http://www.sunpictures.com/html/index.php. Accessed August 4, 2020. On the re-making of historic photographic processes and experiments in contemporary photography, see the exhibition “Back to the Future. The 19th Century in the 21st Century,” curated by Kim Knoppers and Ann-Christin Bertrand, C/O Berlin Foundation, Amerika Haus, Berlin, September 29, 2018–December 1, 2018.   4 Raydex was a forerunner of the “cabro” (carbon prints) color-print process, which in turn is related to the pigment printing of digital photography. For the carbon print see Joseph Solomon Friedman, History of Color Photography (Boston: The American Photographic Publishing Company Boston, 1945 [1st printing 1944]), 451; Dusan Stulik and Art Kaplan, The Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes: Carbon (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Conservation Institute, 2013).   5 See Kim Timby, 3D and Animated Lenticular Photography, Studies in Theory and History of Photography 5 (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2015).   6 See Bettina Gockel, ed., in collaboration with Patrizia Munforte, American Photography: Local and Global Contexts, Studies in Theory and History of Photography 2 (Berlin: Akademie ­Verlag, 2012).   7 See http://whiteshadows.org/index.html. Accessed August 4, 2020.   8 See the official websites of both photographers: http://www.hans-danuser.ch/; http:// raymondmeier.com/. Accessed August 4, 2020.   9 On this, see the conference “The Business of Photography,” Leicester, June 17–18, 2019, https://photographichistory.wordpress.com/annual-conference-2019. Accessed August 4, 2020. 10 Devin Fore, “The Myth Reversed: Perspectives of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,” in idem, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 21–74.

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Foreword

11 See most recently regarding the forming the legend of the Bauhaus: Robin Schuldenfrei, Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Mark Lamster, The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018). 12 Walker Evans – Polaroids, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art (Zurich: Scalo, 2002). Cf. most recently Svetlana Alpers, Walker Evans. Starting from Scratch (Princeton University Press, 2020), German translation: Svetlana Alpers, Walker Evans. Leser, Autor, Photograph (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 2020). [Kind advise by Wolfgang Kemp]. 13 The book therefore also positions itself in the context of many new projects about color and photography. One example is the project “COLOR. History of the Theory and Practice of Color” at the University of Konstanz (German only): https://www.litwiss.uni-konstanz. de/kunstwissenschaft/forschung/forschungsprojekte/. Accessed August 4, 2020; or the research project about the chemicals of photography conceived by Herta Wolf, Department of Art History, University of Cologne, Germany: https://khi.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/en/ forschung/laufende-projekte/puffer-seite/fotografie-als-angewandte-wissenschaft. Accessed August 4, 2020. See most recently the conference “Farbreproduktion im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Praktiken und Funktionen,” October 9–10, 2020, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, organized by Joseph Imorde, Monika Wagner, Barbara Welzel, Andreas Zeising.

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

“Colorism is not something that white people experience.” 1 National Conference for Community and Justice “Being black is still a flaw.”2 Omar Victor Diop “If colour is unimportant, I began to wonder, why is it so important to exclude it so forcefully? If colour doesn’t matter, why does its abolition matter so much?”3 David Batchelor “I do not think it a waste of time to absorb in idleness the austere splendor of this place; also I am aware that its colour stains me through and through. Crudely speaking, the plain is brown, the mountains blue or white, the foothills tawny or purple; but what are those words? Plain and hills are capable of a ­hundred shades that with the changing light slip over the face of the land and melt into a subtlety no words can reproduce. The light here is a living thing, as varied as the human temperament and as hard to capture […].”4 Vita Sackville-West

1.  Colorism Versus Kolorismus The following introduction seeks to present a number of reflections on, and methodological and theoretical approaches to, the broad spectrum of subjects explored in the contributions to this book. We begin with an experimental application of a number of pre-existing tenets of art history and art theory to the history of photography. The intent here is to generate a suite of categories and terms that will serve as the foundation for a systematic examination of color in the photographic image; not to analyze the artistic photographic image in isolation, but rather to situate it in the referential framework provided by the arts and associated media. The intent is to show that

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The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

color as it exists in photography—both aesthetically and technically—is inseparable from color as it exists as a social category: to date, there have been a handful of isolated research projects investigating this subject, which will be presented in this book. Readers will quickly become aware of how difficult it is to decolonize the use of color in photography, and how necessary it is to be aware of the crucial role that color in photography can play in the formation of stereotypes. In seeking to find a name for the range of issues that the use of color in photography brings to the surface, one could speak of “the arts and politics of the colors of photography.” In the 1990s, this attempt to link arts and politics was particularly prevalent—fashionable, even—in Anglophone art-historical and literary discourses. It is evident that the critical spirit and approach that emerged back then is today experiencing a revival of sorts, albeit in a form more suited to our present moment and in the context of newly ignited global political debates. Although ideological critique was supposed to have been cast aside in the postmodern era, it remains the primary methodological instrument for adequately analyzing the political dimension of a broad swathe of art and culture. This book is the latest volume to appear in the series “Studies in Theory and History of Photography,” a series which from the outset has sought to elucidate the key issues present in the history of international art and photography and the problematic way in which a wide array of practices and protagonists have been excluded from dominant narratives. Part of this work of reappraising and revising research into the history of photography includes acknowledging the formation of new terminology and integrating it into research practices while also ensuring that these terms are deployed alongside traditional concepts in a critical fashion. Thus the term “colorism”—as defined, for example, by the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ)5—is connected to an awareness of the issues of racist exclusion and the formation of racist stereotypes and has absolutely nothing to do with the German term Kolorismus, which is used in art-historical research to designate a particularly colorful style of painting. The step to be taken is thus from the technical and aesthetic designation Kolorismus to the critical sociological term “colorism.” Given that it is not only painting but—above all—photography that has actively participated (and continues to do so) in forms of discrimination and as well as protest through the application of black and white and color, it is necessary to examine the impact of photographic techniques and aesthetics from a critical and sociological perspective. A merging of the terms Kolorismus and colorism could be of great value to photographic research. Why? Because photographic images can be just as aesthetically and politically relevant as works of visual art.

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

2. The Phenomenon of “Color” in the Academic Discipline of Art History The phenomenon of “color” has yielded a complex and heterogeneous array of research in the field of art history. Internationally, John Gage was the first to successfully examine materials, historical contexts, and theories of color in art in connection with one another.6 Still, even more than two decades after it was published, Sir Ernst Gombrich’s patronizing review of Gage’s magnum opus Colour and Culture in The ­Burlington Magazine remains fresh in the mind. Gombrich found little of value in the examination of a phenomenon—color—that he saw as being both so isolated and simultaneously intangible.7 It is worth looking at Gombrich’s subtle snark in more detail, because we have yet to see such a critical interrogation of a systematic study of color as pertains to the history of photography: “‘For all its scholarly apparatus, this is not an academic book.’ These opening words of John Gage’s engaging introduction to his massive tome should not be dismissed as a conventional apologia. He is right in claiming that his chosen topic, ‘the way in which the societies of Europe and the United States have shaped and developed their experience of colour’, does not lend itself easily to systematic treatment, for, strictly speaking, the ‘experience of colour’ can no more be said to have a history than has the experience of light, of sound or of smell. Histories can be written, and have been written, of the science of optics, of physiological and psychological theories of colour vision as well as (related to these distinct subjects) the technology of colour photography, colour television and the various wizardries of the computer which have recently resulted in a spectacular improvement of colour reproductions (not always evident in the plates of this book). ­Martin Kemp in his book The Science of Art, subtitled ‘Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat’, has devoted two chapters to the impact of these theories on art and technology, but it appears that this work, published in 1990, came too late for Gage to do more than list it in the bibliography of one chapter. Admittedly, the two books overlap only in certain areas for, as we have seen, Gage has cast his net much more widely. Packed with out-of-the-way information which, one readily believes, took thirty years to assemble, his book is enticing to browse in, but less easy to read from cover to cover. Despite the chronological framework, it is best approached as an encyclopaedia of colour lore. A good many of its chapters are likely to remain the standard treatment of their respective topics for years to come, for example its discussions of ancient colour terminology, of the renderings of the rainbow in painting, of the history of the palette and of theories of colour music.”8

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The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

Just one year after the publication of this elegantly disguised takedown, Gombrich himself published a book about a phenomenon which at first glance seemed equally isolated: shadows.9 Shadows and colors—what is the decisive factor in determining their respective valorization and importance? The shadows of subjects and objects suggest an eminent history of philosophical, epistemological, art-theoretical, and arthistorical implications that “color” cannot hope to keep pace with, despite having also been the subject of much theoretical and intellectual research, reflection, and discussion. But shadow is closely linked to the line, seen as the high point of canonized and institutionalized art, behind which lies an origin myth first put forward by Pliny the Elder and later strategically transformed and codified by Giorgio Vasari. In the myth’s original telling, drawing owes its origin to the farewell scene of a love story, in which a girl traces the outline of the shadow of her lover’s face cast on the wall by a lamp in order to capture his image before he departs. In contrast, color is attributed with the qualities of ephemerality, superficiality, and a purely sensual, subjective experience. As an object of inquiry, “color” also seems to splinter into numerous fields upon closer examination, particularly when it comes to practices and theories. Despite the efforts of researchers around the world, color generates an academic dilemma, one which feeds on the overwhelming referentiality of “color,” as Gombrich correctly observed: it is a matter of subjective and objective perception, historically determined questions of taste, art-theoretical considerations and assessments, (cultural-) tech­ nical practices10 and their economic and globally organized structures. One must only consider the worldwide trade in organic and non-organic pigments and the corres­­ponding environmental impact—has anybody systematically addressed this issue from the perspective of art and photographic history? Would it not be better, and indeed imperative, to continue working on the various, separate histories of color (along technical, aesthetic, social, economic, and political lines, for example)? ­Gombrich insinuates that this is the only possible solution, and in so doing rejects a complicated, convoluted, multilinear, and perhaps even self-contradictory form of historical scholarship. His “solution” conveniently corresponds to the approach taken in his own books, which themselves are primarily engaged in the construction of “stories.” Thus, he emphasizes that Gage’s book is not one to be read from cover to cover. He expects a story. But this was never Gage’s intent. Does Gombrich’s approach towards, and critique of, Gage’s work still fulfill today’s desire to understand the questions surrounding color in photography in their complexity and diversity? Or would we be better off following in the footsteps of Gage, with his capacity to draw from a wide range of influences with a clear desire to uncover new areas of inquiry, ranging in his case from the history of core phenomena of painting to the history of Indigenous Australian art? Gage was, after all, capable of unpicking the histories of colors and investigating them both in isolation and at times in relation to one another, without ever succumbing to the urge to synthesize everything.

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

The matter/issue of color becomes more complicated when we consider its material basis. The materials to which colors are applied—such as paper, canvas, ceramics, and metal—as well as their various types and combinations determine the appearance and visuality of colors just as much as varnish and lacquer. In addition, there are assessments of the “look” of colors; for example, verdicts on whether glossy or matte colors are appropriate. Such evaluations can be found in art theory, fashion, and industrial design operating under a range of historical and cultural conditions. Many of these aspects also concern the history of photography and its treatment of color. Is it therefore impossible to examine the complicated and undoubtedly highly complex subject of “color” in a way that the existing chronological narrative of the invention and development of color photography is furnished with a new “neighbor,” one which is somewhat unpredictable, complicated, wayward, playful, critical, and incomplete? Could the connection to the history of visual art even be an opportunity to establish color in photography as an ongoing subject of research, with a particular focus on the way that the history of color in photography exhibits manifold practical and theoretical references to the topoi of color in the traditional arts? Old-school historians of photography would perhaps not approve of such a suggestion, as they seemingly wish to keep research into the history of photography “pure,” just as the proponents of “straight photography” imagined themselves to have finally prevailed over art photography and thereby its dependence on painting. The only thing is that today—and this is hardly new—we find ourselves in such a multi-layered situation with respect to photography that polarizing and dichotomizing approaches to the writing of the history of photography (as a supposedly singular and unified phenomenon) no longer appear convincing and rarely even coherent. What, then, can the established discipline of art history contribute to the history of photography when it comes to an appraisal of color?

3. Towards Three Categories for The Colors of Photography At this point I would like to hone in on something specific: in terms of its arguments and strategies, the dispute over the establishment of color as the dominant feature of painting in contrast to drawing, which was long seen as superior and more closely connected to intellectual processes lends itself particularly well to comparison with those in the history of photography as a modern art form. This does not mean simply equating or transposing the terms of the dispute, but rather carrying out a genuinely critical comparison. It thus appears that the dispute between line and color—disegno versus colorito—occupies a similar position within the history of painting as the conflict between black-and-white (achromatic) and color in the history of photography. Although these querelles in painting and photography do not align historically, there

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The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

are similarities to be found in the long-standing and wholesale aesthetic rejection of vibrant colors in the discourses surrounding both media. In the world of painting, this dispute or even outright battle between line and color meant that the academic— that is, institutionalized—definition of “high” art considered a wide range of vibrant hues to be aesthetically and intellectually inferior. Instead, according to this perspective, it was primary colors that should predominate, indicating a restriction or even disciplining of the excessive and iridescent colors of the rainbow, intermediate hues, or subjectively chosen colors. From this normative perspective, power, control, and restriction are applied directly to a painting’s (colorful) visuality, which was not to get in the way of the supposedly more manageable text and narrative which were seen as the foundation of the image. This demand finds itself thoroughly manifested by way of art history’s foundational methodology, namely iconology, wherein texts provide the actual key to an image. Bildwissenschaft11—a subsection of art history scholarship which exists primarily in the German-speaking world—favors the opposing trend, but ultimately remains too close to iconology as a methodology—and perceived in the Anglophone world in particular as one based upon metaphysics—to be truly capable of instigating a theoretical and methodological renewal of image analysis. Historically, the aesthetic construction in favor of primary colors and against the use of the full spectrum of colors and hues, was almost aggressively defended by figures such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the London Royal Academy of the Arts, particularly in his Discourses, which prolonged the academic authority of the text with respect to the visual arts.12 He feared that the “mob,” upon entering the social stage and the spaces of the art world in the mid-eighteenth century, would only enjoy “colorful” art as a sort of eye candy, without being able to discern an artwork’s “great idea” as a result of sensorial distraction. The “great idea” presupposed that the artwork could universalize the scenes and subjects it depicted, and even immortalize them. For their part, viewers of art, the “happy few,” had to be acquainted with the canonical historical, philosophical, and literary texts, or at least their topoi. This academic ideal saw statements, impressions and interpretations that were subjective or tied to a particular era as foreign, even hostile. The aesthetic use of color thus had to be made objective. This, however, could only transpire in conjunction with an elite, who came to a consensus with each another about this process of objectivization. On the other side of this elite were the masses, the “mob,” a persistent thorn in ­Reynolds’s eye, even if he ultimately proved unable to stem the tide of visitors to public academy exhibitions and the subsequent mixing of different social groups that this brought with it. This development also opened the floodgates to a stream of caricatures that continues to flow to this day. These caricatures revolve around the behavior of museum and exhibition visitors and make fun of their ignorance—maintaining that even when they get the chance to closely inspect the art on display, they

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

are still unable to understand its meaning and make fools of themselves with their grotesque attempts to do so. If photography enthusiasts and theorists were for a long time both unable and unwilling to associate photography and vibrant color with one another, then this is not only due to the maintaining of the purity of the medium’s indexical capacity: there was a fear of a kind of chromatic “contamination” of photography’s purportedly direct relationship with reality. Of even greater importance was the nexus between “the masses,” “mass media,” and color. A color photography that enjoyed broad popularity could not be elitist, and was therefore devoid of high symbolic value. Art photography’s strategies of distinction and their function of ­isolating photography from its use as a mass medium revolved heavily around the issue of color. These distinction strategies are decidedly similar to those deployed by academic visual art, which by no means sought to make itself accessible to the “masses.” It was not until around 1900 that art photography, in the form of Pictorialism, first declared the painterly use of color to be one of its key characteristics, though without seeking to define a distinctly photographic way of utilizing color, but making reference to its pre-existing use in painting. The “painterly” fuzziness of Pictorialists’ photographs aestheticized color somewhat in the manner of high art: the colors of the Pictorialists typically seem gentle and suggestive, although this is not always the case. Indeed, to view all of the photography produced by this movement merely as blurry adaptations of paintings that overly indulge in the use of pastel tones would betray a clichéd understanding of the genre. Many practitioners of Pictorialism began to use stronger (more academic) colors such as green and red, which continue to inspire contemporary artists to this day. One thinks for example of Jeff Wall’s admiration of Heinrich Kühn, who is today considered a forerunner of the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement and modern photography as a whole and who modeled himself after Paul Strand. It is no coincidence that Kühn’s interpretation of the Pictorialist idiom exhibits a filmic quality.13 The “identity” of the elitist genre of Pictorialist photography, ill-suited for mass dissemination, is based on gentle hues and contours, standing in direct contrast to colorized “travel photographs” or the folklorist images such as those distributed by Photoglob or the “masses.”14 Thus, even though the Pictorialists’ use of color might appear to us today as “bright and colorful,” its “painterly” use of color distanced itself from an “excessive” use of color, just as academic art sought to do in similar fashion. Academic art has endeavored to thwart artists’ individual experiments, while the artistic self-empowerment that photography facilitates sought to disassociate itself from colorful travel photography intended for mass consumption. The use of color in photography was thus a crucial starting point for the medium’s demarcations, definitions, self-determinations, strategies, differentiations, and claims of distinction. As a whole, this was historically a very diverse process, about which we still know very little.

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The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

Between 1910 and 1920, modern photography rejected color in favor of black and white, firstly by degrees and then much more conclusively, with the aim of being perceived as an autonomous medium and art form. The reference point of demarcation for both phases in the emergence of photography as an autonomous form thus consisted in defining photography as a mass medium and industrial product. It is precisely these strategic and topos-rich interrelations between photography as an art form and an aesthetically autonomous visual medium and photography as a mass medium which could in future contribute to a more precise examination of the three alongside each other rather than simply perpetuating a rhetorical dualism. As a result, three possible focal points for future research into the colors of photography could be: A) photography as an aesthetically autonomous visual medium and artistic form; B) its relationship to the history of visual art; and C) the history of color photography as a mass medium. Alongside the comparative pursuit of various topoi in these three research areas, we would also be able to determine how strictly photography adhered to the black-and-white aesthetic so long as modern visual art likewise continued to retain its self-definition as “high” art while the technical coloring process in advertising photography were also beginning to be elaborated and perfected. In the 1960s and ’70s, when the ideal of “high” art began to erode (an ideal that was rooted in the traditional academic arts and which modern art was likewise reluctant to relinquish due to the pathway it provided to museums), the emotional appeal of black-and-white photography (as an art form) quickly began to dissipate in equal measure. Black-and-white photography started to become “classic.” It became an object of collections, and established itself on the art market, but was no longer a driving force of innovation in modern art. During this period, the Museum of Modern Art published the exhibition catalogue William Eggleston’s Guide (1976).15 This publication constituted the arrival of color photography in the world and system of the art museum. The technical and aesthetic price was, while not high, necessarily, certainly laborious and transformative. Images on slide film were transformed into dye transfer prints in order to be exhibited. The catalogue had a sumptuous look that resembled, at least on a superficial level, the work of the “Old Masters” (fig. 1). The exhibition then toured the United States, with Eggleston spreading the word among art circles. But it was not until 2008 that the retrospective exhibition William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Videos 1961–2008 was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which later traveled to the Haus der Kunst in Munich, where it received a lukewarm reception from the public.16 The broad art-viewing public still held their reservations about color photography. Since then, the Eggleston exhibitions have continued to be shown all around the world, and particularly in the digital age audiences have begun to love his art and use of color. Although the advent of digital photography has meant that Eggleston’s conception of color remains highly relevant, in his time he was already

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

1:  Cover of the exhibition catalogue William Eggleston’s Guide, with an essay by John Szarkowski. MoMA, NY, 1976. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Offset, printed in color, 23.5 × 23.5 cm. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY. Object number: ARCH.5203. © 2020. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

making deliberate use of extremely bright colors and their intensification made possible by technological developments. And it would appear to be a paradoxically timeless—or at least immensely flexible—approach, one that would struggle to function without his idea that color can become visually autonomous. Or, expressed differently: the explication of color’s visual autonomy in the medium of photography facilitated color photography’s admission to the realm of the art museum. An aside: since 1992, this seminal photographer and his oeuvre have been promoted by the “Eggleston Art Foundation.”17 Nomen est omen.

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4. William Eggleston and the Visual-Theoretical Implications of His Color Photographs “I love abstract painting. I spend a lot of time looking at it. I bet that subconsciously it had something to do with what I was trying to get at.”18 William Eggleston “We were getting away from what we had understood what photography was, moving more into what we felt was art […].”19 William Eggleston It is surely no coincidence that the first photographer to establish color photography in art exhibitions and museums combined factors A and B and incorporated C into his conceptual framework in a nuanced and refined manner. Eggleston’s prominent role in establishing color photography as a valid art form has often been foregrounded in research into the artist, while the aforementioned referential and conceptual components of his work have received relatively scant attention in comparison. Eggleston made reference to the mass-media color photograph of daily life outside the art world through a mixture of snapshot aesthetics, street photography, and the capturing of seemingly banal objects and situations. It is precisely this multifaceted but by no means arbitrary form of referentiality that explains how his photographs open themselves up to such broad interpolation of meaning: as documents of the social and political contexts of the Nixon era; as existentially, phenomenologically, and psychologically charged works. The invitation to interpretation that Eggleston’s photographs offered (and still offer) to art critics and academics was crucial in elevating them to the status of art. This was aided by the fact that Eggleston seemed to be using his photographs to critically reflect on the use of color and black and white, or at least offered the possibility of such a theoretical consideration within his images. He thus brought together photography as a description of reality, photography as a concept, and photography as a theory of the image, in the process combining the three factors (A, B, and C) in a way that was as insightful as it was associative. A good example of the theoretical potential of Eggleston’s images is Untitled (ca. 1968), (fig. 2). It is worth ­taking a closer look at this particular photograph. A young black woman walks along a street populated with car dealerships located on the outskirts of a city, her profile cut off at the thigh by the lower edge of the image. Her earth-toned blouse displays a red and yellow pattern that goes well with her brown trousers, creating a harmony between her clothing and her skin tone, while her straight black hair corresponds perfectly with her black handbag. The woman looks directly at the camera with a serious but incidental gaze. Immediately to her right we see the back of a grey-haired white man of a similar height wearing a

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

2:  William Eggleston, Untitled, ca. 1968, pigment print, 40.6 x 50.8 cm. From: Phillip Prodger, William Eggleston. Porträts (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2016), 173, fig. 83.

white shirt and a black woolen cardigan that has slid down from his shoulders. In both figures Eggleston embodies not only color versus black and white but a number of other dichotomies as well. A person of color versus a white person, a woman versus a man, youth versus age, forwards versus backwards. There is no contact between the two figures. Eggleston’s images are distinctly devoid of action. Occasionally, the figures therein function almost like arabesques. The young woman is striding forwards into the world of the observer, while the older man moves into the background. He recedes, while she approaches. In capturing this situation, this scene—which has the appearance of a film still—in a transitory space where people and cars do not linger but at most make a mere pit-stop, Eggleston emphasizes—almost theoretically—the moment of transition. One figure (the woman) is coming while the other (the man) is going. With her colorful, modern outfit, the black woman seems to become a theoretical figure in the querelle between color and black-and-white. She represents color as a kind of visual “plea,” but not only aesthetically, since the combination of youth, femininity, and fashion might indicate that color photography belongs to a contemporary image of society that the photograph both serves and lays the foundations for, and in whose creation she plays an active and critical part. In service of this goal, Eggleston is willing to consciously “other” the woman, who is juxtaposed against the

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traditional culture and aesthetic embodied by the old white man. A third position or figure that would point beyond the dichotomy of color versus black-and-white is not visualized. Moreover, the “black-and-white” that Eggleston here makes reference to was already at that time a category that was as classic as it was obsolete. At the same time as Eggleston’s color images were appearing, William Klein’s grainy, blurred approach to black-and-white photography—as seen in the publication

3:  Cover of William Klein’s photo book Tokyo, © William Klein.

Tokyo (whose images were shot in 1961 but first published in 1964) (figs. 3, 4)—as well as the Provoke photography movement in Japan were breaking open and complicating the category of “black-and-white,” initially inciting a shocked public reception. ­Eggleston was not operating on the frontlines of this renewal of photography, however, but was instead dedicated to photography as an art form that was trying to make its way into the museum. This also constituted a kind of renewal. Both of these aspirations were closely intertwined, since today, for its part, Provoke is also considered museum-worthy by now. These kinds of international connections and their impact on the system of the arts as well as society more broadly can and should be the subject of greater research. What is certain, however, is that this historical period was witness to a “re-invention of photography” on a number of levels.20 Eggleston’s nowiconic Untitled (ca. 1968), was sold together with 35 other photographs in a reprinted series under the title “Photographic Masterworks by William Eggleston” at Christie’s on March 12, 2012, attaining a substantial sum. The “originals” were digitally “re-mastered” (the colors had been enhanced, among other alterations) and printed on an inkjet device. These so-called “pigment prints” constitute the transfer of the “originals” into the digital age, which, as in this case, allow for images to be drastically enlarged— from 51 × 41 cm as they originally appeared on dye transfer paper to a 152 × 112 cm format. Acceptance of these digitally rendered new editions, produced with image

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

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4:  William Klein, Subway, Tokyo, 1961, gelatin silver print, © William Klein.

and printing techniques established in the advertising industry, has clearly spread to both collectors and art museums, as indicated by the extremely high total auction price of almost six million US dollars. This event signifies the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the colors of photography, one which shows that the relationship between the aforementioned factors—photography, visual art, and the mass medium— enable a systematic and critical examination of color in photography. The visual-theoretical implications of some of Eggleston’s photographs (or perhaps even his oeuvre in general) oscillate between photographic topoi: photography as description, as Evidenz, as document, and as artwork. These are established categories. At the same time, however, color in photography has, in a way, refigured two of visual art’s central modes of legitimation: the idea (“idea”) and the invention (“invenzione”). One might think that both are only connected to conceptual art, which since the 1960s has enormously increased the prestige and value of photography as an art form. But idea and invention have more fundamental, theoretical, and discursive importance, as they to some extent neutralize prejudices against “superficial” color and even permit surfaces—as they appear in photographic images—to be paradoxically celebrated as something profound. These art-historical topoi are also naturally accompanied by the image of the photographer as an intellectual artist concerned with internal experience and invention, a stance which Sugimoto and Gursky, for

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example, never tire of emphasizing. Celebrating the photographer as a genius presupposes a connection to these ennobling formulae.

5. Idea and Invention – Elevating Color in/for Photography In her book about the first of two trips to Persia between January and May of 1926, Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) describes the colorfulness of the relentless rocky desert that surrounds Tehran, placing her in stark contrast to other English travelers of the time, who complained of the country’s desolate landscape and in stereotypical fashion expressed a yearning for the green hills and hedges of their homeland (“Constable Country”). She also made a number of theoretical observations concerning the deficiency of language in the face of optical impression, ones well suited to our analysis of photography: “I do not think it a waste of time to absorb in idleness the austere splendour of this place; also I am aware that its colour stains me through and through. Crudely speaking, the plain is brown, the mountains blue or white, the foothills tawny or purple; but what are those words? Plain and hills are capable of a hundred shades that with the changing light slip over the face of the land and melt into a subtlety no words can reproduce. The light here is a living thing, as varied as the human temperament and as hard to capture; now lowering, now gay, now sensuous, now tender; but whatever the mood may be, it is superimposed on a basis always grand, always austere, never sentimental. The bones and architecture of the country are there, whatever light and colour may sweep across them; a soft thing passing over a hard thing, which is as it should be.”21 The countless array of hues and the transitions between them brought forth by light’s infinite capacity to shift and change have fascinated colorist painters from Rubens to Gainsborough to Monet. In their own individual ways, they have each accomplished the transposition of the ephemera of color’s effects to the image. Above all, however, these artists were also able to integrate color into a visual system of meaning. This is to say that these painters were not primarily interested in creating a realistic image, but (in the case of Rubens)22 wanted to view colored shadow as an essential component of a colorful image, to depict light and color as a dynamic, physical unity, one analogous to the philosophical unity of humanity and nature (Gainsborough),23 or provide the observer with a radically contemporary viewing experience, one which was not only pleasurable but also provided insights into the temporal relationship between optics and perception (Monet). For photography, the “problem of color” presents a similar difficulty, for if it does not wish to be a representative medium it

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

must incorporate color into a considered, conscious, and creative visual concept. Until the 1960s, this was only achieved by a handful of photographic artists. Those who viewed color in photography solely as an advance and praise its “naturalness” or “realism” ignored that such color was in fact only a supplement, a kind of make-up. In this vein, the creators of Photoglob between 1890 and 1910 infamously praised the naturalness of the colors produced by this photo lithographic printing process they used, but the resulting images had and still have a decidedly artificial or decorative appearance, and they look colorized. It is difficult or even impossible to discern the role that color is supposed to play in these images in terms of elevating their artistic merit/value to the potential viewer. In stark contrast to these is the way color is applied in some of the autochrome images produced by the Lumière brothers, who evidently had a knack for connecting the use of color with intelligent visual jokes: a pink crotchet doily, for example, functions as a self-deprecating disclosure of the aesthetic necessities of the chemical process.24 Here the viewer lingers for a moment, allows the colors to convey the idea to them, which is implicitly connected to the “opticity” (Max Imdahl) of the image.25 The “general opticity” is itself an expression of “the supremacy of color [...].” Imdahl, a German art historian with a keen sense of the practical and theoretical challenges faced by artists, developed these ideas through a comparison of Watteau’s and Chardin’s respective conceptions of color: “From the perspective of Chardin’s painting, relatively unempirical visual conventions manifest in such general modalities of the visible or the tangible. […] As a product of humble and dispassionate observational skills, sensitized and articulated through painting, the use of color in Chardin’s images correlates strongly to the chromatic reality of the world that exists outside of the image, although they are not simply identical to it.”26 The level of linguistic nuance with which Imdahl approaches painting and the question of color’s relation to reality and its theoretical potential is something that is yet to be reached in the field of photographic research. By incorporating Sackville-West’s observations, we could summarize by saying that the only linguistic formations and images that are capable of rendering the experience of an optical impression are those that takes possession of an autonomous aesthetic system of art. In Sackville-West’s case this is her aesthetic “trick,” to capture the landscape as if it were an organism, and sometimes even a subject (one which, for example, blushes), and in so doing, almost as if by accident, invent the country that she is describing. Enlisting the idiom of the animate and the organic to “describe” the sparse, stony, seemingly dead landscape of Persia is an ingenious artistic ploy, and clearly inspired by Romanticism. It was precisely this—the positioning of invention as the nucleus of the “travelogue” genre—that the author theoretically reflected on at

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the beginning of her book Passenger to Teheran. In her view, description for description’s sake is mind-numbingly boring; the paradox of description as invention, however, is art—and therefore entertaining, intelligent, at times even full of insight. If photography, then, which will in some way forever remain an illustrative medium, is at the same time also an invention, and this invention or conceptualization encompasses color, then photography is art. If so, then color becomes an integral, “conscious” component of photography as an art form.

6. The Role of Color in Shaping Stereotypes Though the aforementioned Untitled (ca. 1968), (fig. 2) already provides a visualization of the issue of skin color’s depiction in color photography, Eggleston clings to a polarizing structure and derives his photographic style from abstract expressionism, a movement dominated by white Western men. It is only in recent years that both photographers and researchers have begun to consciously examine the nexus between color and photography with respect to gender and race.27 With reference to these societal demands, David Batchelor has termed the negative connotations ascribed to color as “chromophobia.”28 On the basis of this hostility to color that Batchelor sees as being inscribed in Western art and culture, Ilka Becker subsequently discusses the various theoretical and artistic attempts to use color in non-referential ways and subject it to a process of decolonization. Her focus on “gender” and color can also be applied to “race” and color. Becker’s intent is to explore alternatives to existing theoretical models such as Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. One such alternative is Karen Barad’s notion of “agential realism,” which favors a process-oriented interplay of passive and active elements, giving rise to new arrangements: for example, attributions of color and race are not rejected but enter into an “intra-action” with one another. All of the above remain quite abstract theoretical interventions. Such approaches can and should be expanded upon through an empirical and historical examination of the ways in which photographic stereotypes are formed through and with “color” with respect to attributions of gender and race. The controversially received work and conceptualization of artist Carrie Mae Weems, for example, has been subject to some critique but as yet little in the way of art-historical analysis.29 In her project From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995– 1996),30 bright color counteracts the black and white of the original colonial and anthropological photographs. The objectifying quality of black and white is called into question by the brilliance of the colors. As a result, a critical communication emerges between the images and their respective colors, which the installation makes materially manifest. Recent protests in the USA are breathing fresh life into projects such as Weems’s, as media reports show that many people of various backgrounds

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

and “colors” have taken part in protests responding to the murder of George Floyd. This means that many people are no longer prepared to accept societies being divided into black and white. The future thus belongs to color—to the differentiation of color and to the breadth of hues and tones, in all their social and aesthetic dimensions as well as artistic-photographic applications. This also pertains to the visual politics of large companies. On June 19, 2020, an article titled “Stereotype’s weight became too much for brand” appeared in the business section of the New York Times International Edition. The article, written by Tiffany Hsu, was illustrated with a photograph that depicted a half-empty bottle of Aunt Jemima pancake syrup next to a plate stacked with an enticing pile of pancakes just waiting to be loaded onto a fork invitingly pointing in the direction of the viewer (fig. 5). The article’s opening paragraph outlines how since the 1960s, the “mammy” stereotype embodied in the figure of “Aunt Jemima” has undergone cosmetic changes instead of simply being replaced due to its racist implications: “The decision to remake the pancake-mix and syrup brand, which was founded in 1889, came as widespread protests

5:  Tiffany Hsu, “Stereotype’s weight became too much for brand,” June 19, 2020. From International New York Times. © 2020 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license. 6: Daniel Dorsa for the NYT, Aunt Jemima Original Syrup, photograph, 2020, Photo: Daniel Dorsa/The New York Times/Redux/laif.

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against racism have reverberated throughout the United States, leading to changes in the corporate world and the toppling of statues depicting Confederate leaders.”31 It may appear somewhat unfortunate that the accompanying black-and-white photograph undermines the text by not actually conveying any of the brand’s problematic imagery, instead whetting readers’ appetites for pancakes served with Aunt Jemima syrup. At best, one could say that the photograph is intended to document the stereotype. But what has a greater impact: image or text? Or are both supposed to compete against one another? We might also assume that the New York Times’s editors had additional pedagogical motivations: perhaps the intent is for readers to independently recognize the issue with this inviting image, which retains its allure even when stripped of the intense colors found in the original photograph and advertisement (fig. 6). Can a photograph or visual advertising concept be transformed into a document simply by being reduced to black and white? Furthermore, who was the Aunt Jemima character based on? As the NYT article explains, the model for Aunt Jemima was in fact a former slave who had her portrait taken at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. Could it also just as likely be about trying to hold on to a legend that grants the product authenticity? Either way, the crucial point here is that without the Black Lives Matter protests, Quaker Oats would not have decided to distance itself from the mammy logo, with its image of the smiling black woman whose skin and hair function as a “symbol” of the American South and have become so closely tied to the brown syrup’s deliciousness and authenticity in a way that is almost genealogical and naturalized, and has certainly proven effective as a marketing strategy. After all, stereotypes are significant things that can have serious consequences, and by no means should they be carelessly equated with prejudices. Stereotypes are a means by which people orient their perceptions of the world; they are supposed to create order out of the chaos that surrounds us. It is only when prejudices arise as a result of this process that values and valorizations appear alongside them, which are detailed enough that it can be empirically demonstrated when, why, and by whom a “black kid” tends to be perceived as older than a white child of the same age, to provide just one example. In many cases, stereotypes merge with prejudices, which can have serious consequences, as this view then comes to be deeply embedded in our perceptual framework. This process consolidates the decisive moment in which the practices of exclusion and oppression become manifest. Rationality, objectification, empirical knowledge—all play subordinate roles in this impulse towards judgment, which, in the words of John Berger, becomes inscribed in our “ways of seeing.”32 Stereotypes have chromatic associations. In the case of the Aunt Jemima advertisement for a buttermilk pancake mix (fig. 7), the bright, intense colors of red, blue and yellow surround the stereotyped portrait. “Aunt Jemima’s” skin color is linked to the color of both the golden-brown pancakes and their topping with brown syrup. This results in the product’s provenance as being from the good ol’ antebellum Amer-

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7: Aunt Jemima Buttermilk Pancake Mix, detail, ­Photo: Keystone-SDA / AP / John Nacion / STAR MAX / IPX.

ican South quite literally being embodied in the Jemima “mammy” formula.33 The first two authors whose contributions appear in this book address this subject matter in great detail, transferring and applying the category and problem of “colorism” to the history and medium of photography.

7. Tanya Sheehan: On Technological Racism in the System of Photography In her essay, Tanya Sheehan points to a profound issue that is essentially inherent to photography as a technique: on the one hand, the different exposure times for white and black or colored skin, and the aesthetic standards that link light skin with beauty and acceptability on the other. Sheehan notes that in the history of colorized photography and color photography, mixed-race group portraits were fundamentally seen as “difficult” and from the beginning were viewed in a predominantly negative light. Although photosensitive chemicals could have enabled the inclusion of a range of skin colors and tones, white skin remained—and still remains—the international norm. Thus Sheehan remarks that “blackness remain[s] an unresolved photographic problem in the twenty-first century […].” It is only in recent times that photo history studies and even more so in photographic artworks that the relationship between technology and race has begun to be explored in depth. While companies such as HP delegate the resolution of problems to the “user,” Sheehan explains how digital photography could better accommodate “diversity” and “inclusion.” Despite this possibility—or opportunity—companies continue to perpetuate a technological racism

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that stretches back to the nineteenth century, which emerged from the preconceived models, norms, and stereotypes of that era. Photographic technology is thus not “innocent” or “neutral” but instead reflects practices and beliefs concerning exclusion and racist symbolism and labeling. Artist Angélica Dass seeks to deconstruct these codes with a globally conceived project around the photographic capturing of skin color. Humanae, as the project is called, has to date documented skin tones in South America, Europe, Africa, and the United States, presenting them in the chronological order of the project’s progression. The skin color of the photographs’ subjects is not arranged according to social or biological categories. In Humanae, it is not only the arbitrary sequencing of the images that is intended to unsettle the viewer but also the quasi-scientific, objectivizing form of the frontal portrait through which the artist makes reference to anthropological photography and subsequently undermines it through her conception of diversity and individuality. The sheer quantity of images produced by the project, first begun in 2013, is also intended to thwart the Pantone Matching System (PMS), an international standardization tool used in graphic design and the fashion industries. Dass seeks to highlight the fallacy that the globally dominant PMS, which is made up of color cards and charts and has since been digitalized, is some kind of logical or objective “system.” In fact, the spread of the PMS has had a strong influence on color preferences and their appearance, a fact made particularly evident by Pantone’s trendsetting “Color of the Year” (in 2020 this status was awarded to Classic Blue 19-4052). Whether artists can in fact subvert or deconstruct the restrictions and codes inherent to these technologies when they make use of them themselves remains an unanswered question, one which only further highlights the ways in which photographic technology is informed by cultural and political factors. While a “human” project that addresses photography’s technology may perhaps fail, it is paradoxically able to fulfill its critical-artistic credo just the same. In summary, it is the preferences and power of people that configure and deploy photography as a color-blind technology of white culture and politics: “It is therefore more accurate to speak of photography’s race problem as sociopolitical first and technical second.”34

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

8. Deborah Willis: Colors and “Colorism”— and This Book’s Cover Image “I will […] highlight rediscovered archives in public collections, as many of them have re-introduced, in the past ten years, early color photography that was created by well-known photographers from the 1930s Farm Security Administration and others such as Gordon Parks, Bruce Davidson, and Carl Van Vechten, who were known for their black-and-white photography of an America in crisis.”35 Deborah Willis “Being black is still a flaw. […] There is probably an answer in the past that we can use to move forward.”36 Omar Victor Diop Across several groundbreaking studies, Deborah Willis examined the role that photography has played for black communities and other non-white communities in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present day. She has shown in a particularly striking manner how during the civil rights movement photography made a decisive contribution to black Americans’ efforts to create and establish a stance that emphasized black beauty in order to live confident lives in resistance to the prevailing racist political environment and societal praxis. “Posing beauty” is the phrase Willis uses to describe this photographic and sociological phenomenon, ­seeking to frame the medium of photography as having a creative and considerable influence on the process of identity formation and the protests. Treating her project almost like fieldwork, she combines her discoveries of black photographers in American archives as well as countless anonymous photographs of black men and women with a sharp scrutinizing eye trained on contemporary art, which has added weight given her own ongoing artistic photographic practice. The work of Omar Victor Diop, which she discusses in her contribution to this book, is so aesthetically and politically incisive that one of Diop’s images ended up being chosen for our cover. This image is an ideal illustration of Willis’s fundamental argument that photography can—both constructively and critically—create roles and standpoints for (black) people of color, particularly with respect to the situation as it stands in contemporary Germany, which I will elaborate on in greater detail following an initial art-historical appraisal of Diop’s picture. Diop’s self-portrait should be understood, in art-historical terms, as a so-called “character portrait” or “historical portrait.” This type of painting emerged in England in the eighteenth-century, although it did have seventeenth-century precedents. The aim of this genre, theoretically advanced by Sir Joshua Reynolds, was to artistically, socially, and politically enhance the portrait by elevating it to the status of historical

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8: Samuel J. Miller, Frederick Douglass, 1847/1852, daguerreotype, 14 × 10.6 cm (plate), 15.2 × 24 × 2 cm (in closed case), The Art Institute of Chicago, © bpk / The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY / Samuel J. Miller. 9: Unknown, Frederick Douglass, ca. 1855, daguerreotype, 8.3 × 7.0 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Rubel Collection, Gift of William Rubel, 2001.

painting. Clothing, hairstyles, and personal attributes, and occasionally even the overall setting made reference to historic figures and events as well as mythology. Unlike in traditional “status” portraits, these “historical” portraits could also incorporate movement and action, lending them an element of theatricality. These portraits can thus be seen as being suffused with the quality of “performance” in a quite literal sense. Moreover, a historical portrait is supposed to make use of a restricted color palette; in short, the choice of color should convey seriousness and depth of thought and not, for example, be ostentatiously colorful. The goal was a calm treatment of the subject that inspires contemplation, not visual excitement. By conceptually aligning with this historical genre and artistic theory of color, Diop’s photograph not only takes its place in the tradition of the photographic portrait that stretches back to the nineteenth century, but also consciously draws upon a complex array of art-historical signifiers which transcend the portrayal of the subject in their social role and the way in which an image, a pose or a persona is constructed. The photograph contains many often minuscule details that at first glance recall the daguerreotypes which depict abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), who took great care in managing how he was portrayed in photographs: on viewing these portraits, one notes the ear half covered by hair, the shining black jacket, the vest

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

with a botanical pattern, and the bowtie, but above all his hairstyle (figs. 8, 9). A number of historical portrait photographs exist of Douglass in which he has a serious, almost fierce expression, with his voluptuous hair combed high to one side. In Diop’s adaptation of this portrait pose, both the seriousness of the expression and the hairstyle appear burnished with a youthfulness and sheen. The image’s strong, intense, and rich colors make its predecessors—the portrait daguerreotypes and their reproductions—seem all the more pale in comparison. Douglass’s historical importance in the history of abolition and as a forerunner of the civil rights movement is summoned into the present in the form of a kind of role play: a present, however, that is part of a different context. The yellow whistle, Diop’s youthful appearance, and the way his gaze is aimed directly at the viewer convey a presence anchored in the contemporary moment that is conscious of the history of black people and people of color and their struggles for equality. The point seemingly being made here is that current debates around diversity are not only about the treatment of black and non-white football players in a given national team, but rather that this discourse is rooted in historic constellations and fundamental issues of human rights that stretch back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The reference to a necessary historicization of the present is thus one of the most important statements made by this multilayered image. It is also worth noting that the masterful portraits of black people from the eighteenth century are particularly impressive, and the very fact that these men were considered portrait-worthy represents a positive change in the history of the (painted) portrait as a genre. Diop has also engaged with Girodet’s portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley (1746–1805) (fig. 10) in a similar fashion. Ultimately, however, these paintings are artistic outliers and depict exceptional and heroic personalities whose existence and identity are still no indication of tangible and wide-reaching societal progress. In a comparable manner the modern-day positioning of black and non-white football stars as occupying the same social position enjoyed by their white team members must be critically interrogated, particularly given how their position in society was called into question in the discourse surrounding the so-called migration crisis. The case of footballer Jérôme Boateng, a member of the German national team, is one example that springs immediately to mind (fig. 11). In 2016, Boateng was confronted with an insulting remark made by leading AfD (Alternative for Germany) and former CDU politician Alexander Gauland in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung: “People think he’s a good footballer. But they wouldn’t want a Boateng as a neighbor.”37 The clear xenophobic undertones of this comment highlight how precarious the supposed equality of these players really is, and how stark the separation can be between the world of stars and sports on the one hand and “daily life” on the other, both discursively and practically. While the media largely condemned the politician’s “gaffe” (Gauland is part of the right wing of the AfD and its co-leader) they also (consciously or otherwise) gave in to

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the pressure—which inevitably results from such defamatory and demagogic slurs— to prove Boateng’s legitimacy, pointing out that he was actually born in Berlin, has a German mother and a father from Ghana, and is not a Muslim but a Christian. The yellow whistle invokes not only this context of globally composed national football teams, but generates an additional association: Diop (here as Douglass) resembles a referee, and the yellow color of the whistle suggests a willingness to make decisions, to intervene in the “game” and show a “yellow card” as a warning against breaking the game’s rules. Authority and activity are superimposed onto the depiction of a historic personality, as if to leave no doubt in the viewer’s mind that the image is no mere act of remembrance, and certainly does not seek to complete a historical narrative. The direct gaze that confronts the viewer also serves as a kind of challenge, while in one of the original daguerreotypes Douglass is gazing downwards, thus making him more strongly the object of observation than the figure presented in Diop’s re-staging. In a nutshell, one could say that the self-portrait is not only more alive, but as an image which juxtaposes black and white (the jacket and shirt) with brightly colored patterns (the vest, tie, and background), it also appears more active and visu-

10: Anne-Louis Girodet De Roussy-Trioson, Jean-Baptiste Belley, député de Saint-Dominique à la Convention, 1797, oil on canvas, 158 × 111 cm, Musée national du Château de Versailles, © bpk / RMN - Grand Palais / Gérard Blot. 11: German footballer Jérôme Boateng at a training camp ahead of Euro 2016 in Ascona, Switzerland, Photo: KEYSTONE/DPA/Markus Gilliar.

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

ally provocative. The original disappears into historical black and white, while the contemporary image makes use of the chromatic palette of the “here and now” yet still provides space for the inclusion of the traditional black and white. Would it be hyperbolic to identify in this conception of color a plea for the equal treatment of all “colors,” also as this pertains to people? In this sense, “color” is not only approached in terms of its representational value with respect to real color nor only its intrinsic aesthetic value in the context of a particular image. It would also not be assigned a specific symbolic meaning; instead, it would contribute to the shaping of social and political statements and conceptions of a particular present—even generate and interrogate them. Closely related to this is the question of whether terms such as “black history” will continue to fulfill their function in future, or whether a proper historicization of the inherent diversity of race and ethnicity will make the “blackand-white” thinking produced by Western narratives obsolete. The problem of “colorism,” which refers to discrimination on the basis of non-white skin color, is thus addressed through the “complexion” and Kolorismus of the artistic image. This is supplemented by Diop’s youthful and androgynous appearance in this image in contrast to Douglass’s decidedly masculine pose in the original. While in an art-historical sense this play with gender boundaries can be linked to the portraits of young men in the eighteenth century, this “artistic” device also points to the fact that “colorism” is an issue that primarily affects women: the lighter the skin tone, the more beautiful the woman, with “light-skinned” beauty directly correlating to social status, money, and power. By representing beauty with the dark-skinned “self-model,” whose skin color is beautifully accentuated by the colorful pattern surrounding the figure, Diop’s image inverts the traditional and globally omnipresent and discriminatory idea­ lization of lightness and whiteness primarily disseminated by colonialism. This combination of numerous layers of material, social, and discursive meaning and chromatic reference is all the more striking because photography—as fictional as its conception may be—always carries with it the air of realism and thus the quality of credence.

9. Blake Stimson’s Anti-Academic Essay and Paul Strand as a “Third Figure” “The material of the artist lies not within himself nor in the fabrications of his imagination, but in the world around him. The element which gives life to the great Picassos and Cézannes, to the paintings of van Gogh, is the relationship of the artist to content, to the truth of the real world. It is the way he sees this world and translates it into art that determines whether the work of art becomes a new and active force within reality, to widen and transform man’s experience. The

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artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.”38 Paul Strand “It has always been my belief that the true artist, like the true scientist, is a researcher using materials and techniques to dig into the truth and meaning of the world in which he himself lives; and what he creates, or better perhaps, brings back, are the objective results of his explorations. The measure of his ­talent, of his genius, if you will, is the richness he finds in such a life’s voyage of discovery and the effectiveness with which he is able to embody it through his chosen medium.”39 Paul Strand “Our common sense about Paul Strand’s mature work offers us two complementary assumptions about his politics, and neither is very attractive.”40 Blake Stimson Colorito versus disegno is at once a concrete and metaphorical binary, one which Blake Stimson takes as a basis for a critical essay that surveys contemporary political and ideological frameworks.41 In Stimson’s essay, Paul Strand and his photographs become a focal point for the examination of materialist perspectives that have long been a subject of international debate, with the aim of obtaining a new understanding of the beliefs and practices of the “left” and “neoliberalism” in the context of globalization. More broadly, Stimson’s essay represents an attempt to join together historical academic research with intellectual assertions in the vein of Adorno and his contemporary successors. On a historiographic level, Stimson thus belongs to a tradition of critical art history which since the late 1960s has built upon the architecture of the somewhat-fragmented and posthumously edited texts of the Frankfurt School, as Heinrich Dilly’s retrospective appraisal of the revolutionary renunciation of the history of artistic style through to a critical form of art-historical research that encompassed cultural history, neo-iconology, and media theory has shown.42 It was this critical form of art history, known as New Art History in England, which incorporated photography as an object of study while at the same time analyzing visual objects from the realms of both “high” and “low” cultural production, from right across the media spectrum—an approach with a clear historical analogy in the questioning of “high art” and the “masterpiece” by Andy Warhol and The Factory. ­Stimson assigns color and non-color and the line and black and white to ideologies and practices of capitalism; establishing a binary opposition which he then attempts to resolve toward the end of his essay by means of a third position. Stimson understands the genre of the essay as being inherently “anti-academic,” drawing upon the work of

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

Susan Sontag, who in interviews explained how closely her texts were connected with her own personal experiences and subsequent reflection upon them, which she then weaved into analyses of contemporary issues. When one takes into account the fact that Stimson regularly engages with the issue and challenge of “colorism” in his position at the University of Illinois Chicago, it is easier to understand his explicitly “American” stance with respect to “colors,” which oscillate between the practices and utopias of the “American dream.”43 The third position, which Stimson allocates to Paul Strand, is by no means intended as a synthesis of the dialectical positions outlined previously, but rather as an autonomous and action-incorporating approach, worldview, and practice. This would certainly release Strand from his binary coding as either an old-school romantic or an old-fashioned communist idealist political photographer of pre-political provenance.

10. Hans Danuser: Color as Material/Photography as Object Hans Danuser features in this book with works that have an “idea” that has undergone decades of testing and ultimately also transferral to the digital realm: that everything in photography is composed of color. In Danuser’s view, there is no such thing as black-and-white photography, because in his works he always considers the color potential of photography’s chemicals and materials. For this reason he has long stylized himself as an “analog” photographer, while secretly—like all great artists— reflecting on, and experimenting with, new technology and techniques. Danuser is a Swiss photographer and artist with a distinct conceptual approach, which he uses to underline photography’s status as material and object. His insert is detailed in my essay “Uncalibrated: From the Standpoint of Color –Hans Danuser.”

11. Kim Timby: Differentiating How Monochrome Photography Became “BLACK-AND-WHITE” “Monochrome photographs are now commonly referred to as being ‘in black and white’ but before photographing ‘in color’ became common, from the mid-1930s, a vibrant chromatic culture existed in photography.”44 Kim Timby “Multiple factors contributed to the generic categorization of all monochrome photography as ‘black and white’ and its concurrent establishment as being opposed to ‘color.’ Importantly, the tones of monochrome photography had already become predominantly ‘black and white,’ in practice and in speech. Also,

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this shift would not have taken place if color photography weren’t perceived as a serious rival to monochrome photography.”45 Kim Timby Kim Timby is an authority on early photography who directly and extensively questions the binary construction of color versus black and white while also investigating this structure and its vocabulary. In 1850, “black-and-white photography” was an unfamiliar term. Timby demonstrates that the dichotomy between black and white and color in photography became apparent around the turn of the twentieth century in order to distinguish monochrome photography from “color.” As Kelley Wilder also argues, the colors of early photography were “defined” from the “bottom up,” emerging from experiments and practical experience. At the same time, a rather subjective critical vocabulary began to develop, for example in response to the photographs shown at the 1855 World’s Fair. Roughly a century earlier, Denis Diderot had embarked on a similar endeavor in order to grapple with the colors present in the oil and pastel paintings of his time, making Diderot the first art critic of the modern era. There is far too little awareness of the photog­ raphy critics cited by Timby, and in particular the emergent discourse around photography in the mid-nineteenth century, indicating the need for more research into this area, especially with regards to the “signature tones” that the early photographers sought to conceptualize and attain.46

12. Charlotte Cotton and Raymond Meier in Conversation: Show Your Colors Raymond Meier and Charlotte Cotton’s contribution to this book is an experiential report on the legacy of analog photography within the biography and work of an internationally successful commercial photographer and his creative response to digital photography. Raymond Meier began his career in Switzerland with an apprenticeship at the institution now known as the Zurich University of the Arts, and currently ranks as one of the most renowned commercial photographers in the world, and is often described as embodying the legendary Swiss precision. He immediately made the switch from analog to digital photography without a hint of nostalgic reluctance, recognizing that it was necessary to stay on top of the market. But this was not the only reason for a technical change, which in any case was hardly a paradigmatic one: Meier was immediately curious to explore the limits and hybridity of digital processes. As someone with first-hand knowledge of the craft of analog photography and its concomitant lab work, he has become a virtuoso of analog-digital photography. This has allowed him to retain his status and be in great demand in the art business,

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

taking on tasks such as re-mastering the aforementioned photographs by Eggleston for Christie’s. With a sophisticated lab in the Swiss town of Soglio and in New York, as well as an experienced team that has been together for decades, Meier has proven able to perform the balancing act between analog and digital like almost no other commercial photographer. Meier photographs color in an inimitably restrained fashion, even when utilizing “loud” colors. Distance is generated by a precise eye for structures, symmetries, and corresponding forms, meaning any gestures towards empathy, sentimentality, or desire are quickly nipped in the bud. It is precisely this guarding against the clichés associated with color that constitutes the appeal of his work, which could collectively be described as having a still-life character. One could sum up Meier’s style as being composed of the coolest of bright colors that you could imagine. In his photographs, models and stars famous in their own right become foils for abstract color compositions—and are all too happy to oblige, as Meier’s strategy has a radical and original yet decidedly classically product-oriented and glamorous effect. As such, it has the added bonus of reflecting back positively on how the models and stars are represented. Meier’s conceptual approach is grounded in abstraction and de-individualization alongside a simultaneous celebration of the object and the human, whose structures of beauty he emphasizes with both precision and disinterest. Similar to Eggleston, this provides him with a very large spectrum of reference, which explains his decades of success and also lends his photographs a discursive longevity that extends beyond an individual commission, historical context, or social setting. Meier is quite transparent about having an “idea” for his oeuvre; he has an “opus fantasy,” to borrow Peter von Matt’s literary term, and invents the object on the basis of this idea. Many oeuvres in the visual arts have formed around such underlying principles, and contemporary art too cannot achieve sustained historical relevance without these topoi or theorems. Time will tell whether engaging with these topoi while simultaneously interacting with the market and creating commissioned pieces will lead to Meier’s work being ascribed historical importance beyond the advertising business. One aspect that will certainly have a determining effect on whether his work is able to establish such a position is whether Meier is open to submitting his work to a systematic investigation on the basis of its situative and practical contexts. In short: a discursive declaration that an individual artwork is a “masterpiece” (without reference to an artist’s oeuvre) is yet to result in said piece finding its way into the canon of art and photographic history. As long as photographers do not provide access to their archives and the contexts of their work—to say nothing of neglecting to compile an archive at all—the history of photography will be recounted through “icons,” which tend to lead their own lives and leave their creators behind. As the case of Eggleston’s work shows, the art market profits handsomely from this process of extreme stylization of individual works. Historiography is not so easily awed, however. In opening

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his lab and studios in New York and Soglio, and in the conversations he engages in beyond the bounds of his actual “business,” Meier has paved the way for the academic validation of his oeuvre. The first steps have been documented in this book.

13. Bettina Gockel: The “First” Photograph and Its (Lost) Colors My own contribution to this book is based on opening remarks I made at a conference which would later serve as the basis for its creation, and were intended to provide a broad audience with an understanding of the colors of photography as a topic of study. Tackling the issues that surround the “first” photograph was a fascinating process, given all the accompanying myths and historiographic consequences that resulted from the black-and-white reproduction of Nicéphore Niépce’s object. As an art historian I have learned that one should never write anything about an artwork without first having seen the original. This maxim cannot so easily be applied to photography, however. Many museums and archives no longer provide access to photographic objects given their sensitivity to light, instead directing the curious to their digitized collections. As understandable as that may be, it does make it difficult to write something about a work when you are only presented with a reproduction. And yet, photography is reproduction. Reproduction is an inherent component of photography, a fact that is as banal as it is complex. My aim was to discuss what actually happens when a photographic object virtually fades into obscurity in academic discourse in terms of its objecthood, because it circulates and generates knowledge solely as an image. This is based exclusively on the image’s visuality, and not on familiarity with the materials and color effects of the original photograph.

14. Kelley Wilder: Color as an Experimental Concept “This essay argues for a complex approach to the subject of color, regarding its history not simply as that of a problem to be solved through science or technology, but as a concept that evolved in the face of competing and sometimes colluding interests from science, art, and business.”47 Kelley Wilder Color was an important factor in the experiments carried out by proponents of early photography, as Kelley Wilder demonstrates in her essay. Key to this investigation is the fact that the definition of what constitutes a “color” and the words used for its definition/description had not been objectively or definitively formulated. Observation

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

and description were strongly dependent on individual evaluation, and could to some extent be “worked out” in correspondence with the photographers and experimenters. All that was certain was that color as such could not attain the status of objective fact—and this is still the case to this day—which is why color clearly illuminates how problematic “objectivity” is, both in the arts and the sciences. The difference, however, is that “art” or “the arts” can more easily skirt this issue, while the sciences are not only expected to produce facts and objectivity but are in fact required to in order to retain their status as “science.” Wilder is critical of an outdated “history of science” that celebrates fantastic and ingenious inventions, grand biographies, and immeasurable leaps of progress. Instead, she makes the case for a multi-layered view of art and science that explores the chance nature of chemical processes and the subjectivity of the hobbyists and experimenters, depicting photography as a large field of experimentation, as a concept, in contrast to the view of photography as an individual image, as the creation of an individual subject. For Wilder, photography—and particularly color in photography—cannot be understood without having knowledge of its chemical and economic processes, with the history and importance of aniline being her prime example. Anything less would simply be an aesthetic and thus superficial interpretation. Bettina Gockel    Zurich, October 2020

Notes 1

“Colorism,” National Conference for Community and Justice: https://www.nccj.org/ colorism-0. Accessed August 3, 2020. 2 Omar Victor Diop in an interview with Mark Sealy, “Heni Talks. Omar Victor Diop: Black Subjects in the Frame,” December 7, 2018: https://henitalks.com/talks/omar-victor-diopblack-subjects-in-the-frame/#. Accessed August 9, 2020. 3 David Batchelor, Chromophobia, 2nd ed. (London: Reaktion Books, 2019), 21. 4 Vita Sackville-West, Passenger to Teheran (London: Hogarth Press, 1926), 89. 5 See the homepage of the National Conference for Community and Justice: https://www.nccj. org/about/our-story. Accessed August 3, 2020; “Colorism” in National Conference for Community and Justice (see note 3). 6 John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: ­Thames and Hudson, 1993). With the publication of J. M. W. Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind (1987), Gage presented a further work of groundbreaking art history scholarship, in which he developed tangible connections between the use of color in Turner’s painting with the perceptual experience of the Industrial Revolution and the understanding of physics that existed during the same time period. This book inspired later authors to more strongly combine art history with the history of science. The 1990s saw even the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, pursue such an approach, which was particularly evident in the departments led by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Lorraine Daston. This interdisciplinary opening up of art history provided space not only for e.g. a completely new view of the “live

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sciences” but also facilitated new perspectives on photography as an artistic and scientific medium. Conversely, the aesthetic qualities of “scientific” illustrations were examined with respect to their epistemological potential—as was their utilization of color.   7 Ernst H. Gombrich, “Review of Colour and Culture, Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction by John Gage,” The Burlington Magazine vol. 136, no. 1093 (April 1994): 243–244.   8 Ibid., 243.   9 Ernst H. Gombrich, Shadows: The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art. A Companion Volume to an Exhibition at the National Gallery (London: National Gallery Publications, 1995). 10 See the publication Farbstrategien produced by the Hermann von Helmoltz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik as part of the project “Das technische Bild”, ed. Vera Dünkel, Bildwelten des Wissens, Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch für Bildkritik  4,1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006). In this issue, Thomas Macho and Rolf Sachsse, for example, continue the pursuit of the “politics of color.” See also Graustufen, ed. Felix Prinz, Bildwelten des Wissens, Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch für Bildkritik 8,2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011): of particular relevance here is the essay by Friedrich Tietjen concerning the discourse and practices of the photographic reproduction of color before the invention of color photography. 11 Bildwissenschaft’s closest equivalent within Anglophone academia might be Visual Studies, although they do take distinctly different approaches. In brief, Bildwissenschaft can be understood as an intellectual intervention that seeks to greatly expand the scope of the kinds of images worthy of examination and analysis beyond the conventional framework of art history. 12 Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1959). 13 See the exhibition catalogue Das bedrohte Paradies. Heinrich Kühn fotografiert in Farbe, exh. cat., Schloss Tirol (Tirol: Südtiroler Landesmuseum für Kultur- und Landesgeschichte Schloss Tirol, 2014). 14 Daniela Wegmann, Artifizielle ‘Naturwahrheit’: zur Konzeption der frühen Farbfotografie durch die Photochrom-Reiseansichten der Jahrhundertwende (1889-1914) (PhD Dissertation: University of Zurich, 2016). See the collection of photochrome prints by the Photoglob Company at the Library of Congress website: https://www.loc.gov/search/?all=true&fa=contributor:photogl ob+co. Accessed August 18, 2020. 15 William Eggleston’s Guide, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976). 16 William Eggleston, Democratic Camera: Photographs and Video, 1961–2008, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Haus der Kunst, München (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). 17 Homepage of the Eggleston Art Foundation: http://egglestonartfoundation.org/. Accessed October 15, 2020. 18 Jim Lewis, “The Condition of Music – William Eggleston” (Interview), frieze 52 (May 06, 2000): https://www.frieze.com/article/condition-music. Accessed August 3, 2020. 19 Quoted in Susanne Ott, William Eggleston. Die frühen Farbfotografien (1965–1976): Ästhetische Positionen und hermeneutische Verfahren im Blick auf analoge Konzeptionen in Malerei, Literatur und Film (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2005), 59. 20 Hans Danuser, Bettina Gockel, eds., Neuerfindung der Fotografie. Hans Danuser – Gespräche, Materialien, Analysen, Studies in Theory and History of Photography 4 (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2014). 21 Sackville-West, Passenger to Teheran (see note 4), 89.

The Arts and Politics of the Colors of Photography: An Introduction

22 The view of Rubens as the foundational colorist in the history of painting is not simply the result of his painting practice but can also be traced to the emphasis placed on color in the writings of Roger de Piles. As Svetlana Alpers has written, de Piles was interested in “the coloristic seductiveness of his [Rubens’] painting.” (Svetlana Alpers, The Making of Rubens (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995), 72). See also the section “Roger de Piles Looks at Painting,”, 73–84. Alpers analyzes the binary system constructed by de Piles: color versus line, Rubens versus Poussin. His aim is to understand painting as an art form intended for the eyes and not as one that contains ideas and narratives. 23 Bettina Gockel, Kunst und Politik der Farbe: Gainsboroughs Portraitmalerei (Berlin : Gebr. Mann, 1999). 24 See fig. 3 in Bettina Gockel’s essay “The Invention of Black-and-White Photography” in this book, 264. 25 Max Imdahl, Farbe. Kunsttheoretische Reflexionen in Frankreich (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1987), 78. [Original citation in German. Translation here by Ryan Eyers and Joel Scott for Gegensatz Translation Collective. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from German sources are by the translators Eyers/Scott.] 26 Ibid., 78f. 27 Earlier studies, particularly those published in the 1990s, tend to concern themselves with the trio of race, class and gender and reflect upon the exclusion of female photographers of color. See Adrian Piper, “The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists,” in: Next Generation. Southern Black Aesthetics, ed. Devinis Szakacs and Vicki Kopf (Winton-Salem, NC: South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art, 1990), 15–22. In the years since, the places which published such work have become much more visible and the studies themselves distributed much more broadly and internationally, meaning that they have received attention beyond a single field such as feminist studies. 28 See David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). See also Ilka Becker, “Toxische Me*dia*tor*in*n*en. Zur wechselseitigen Kontamination von Gender und Agency in der Kunstwissenschaft,” kritische berichte 4 (2016): 24–33, esp. 30f. 29 Love Stevenson, Das Afroamerikanische als Stereotyp und Prozess der Stereotypisierung in der Fotografie. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried von Carrie Mae Weems (MA Thesis: University of Zurich, 2019). 30 The series was part of the following exhibitions: “Hidden Witness: African-Americans in Early Photography,” The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, February 28–June 18, 1995; “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,” MoMA May 7, 2010–Apr 18, 2011; “Carrie Mae Weems: Estudios Sociales,” Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla, May 20–September 19, 2010; “Narrative Interventions in Photography,” The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, October 25, 2011–March 11, 2012; “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video,” Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, September 21, 2012–January 13, 2013. 31 Tiffany Hsu, “Stereotype’s weight became too much for brand,” The New York Times Inter­ national Edition, June 19, 2020, 7–8. 32 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 2008 [1972]). 33 See also Priya Arora and Sapna Maheshwari, “Criticism of Skin Lighteners Brings Retreat by Unilever and Johnson & Johnson,” The New York Times, June 25, 2020: https://www.nytimes. com/2020/06/25/business/unilever-jj-skin-care-lightening.html. Accessed August 3, 2020. 34 Tanya Sheehan in this book, 68. 35 Deborah Willis in this book, 73.

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36 Omar Victor Diop in “Heni Talks” (see note 2). 37 See Markus Wehner und Eckart Lohse, “‘Nicht als Nachbarn’ – Gauland beleidigt Boateng,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, May 29, 2016: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ inland/afd-vize-gauland-beleidigt-jerome-boateng-14257743.html. Accessed August 3, 2020. 38 Catherine Duncan, Paul Strand – The World on My Doorstep (New York: Aperture, 1994), [4]. 39 Paul Strand, in The Photographic Journal (1963), as quoted in Paul Strand, A Retrospective ­Monograph, vol. 2, The Years 1950–1968 (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1971), 266. 40 Blake Stimson in this book, 112. 41 See also Jorge Ribalta, “Paul Strand after Margaret Mead,” in his blog series Centrist Liberalism Triumphant: Postwar Humanist Reframing of Documentary, part of the blog Still Searching… by the Fotomuseum Winterthur: https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/ articles/26986_paul_strand_after_margaret_mead. Accessed August 3, 2020. 42 Heinrich Dilly, “Zur Einführung,” in Andreas Berndt et al., eds., Frankfurter Schule und Kunstgeschichte (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1992), 9–18. 43 Blake Stimson in this book, 105. On its website, the university provides the following statement concerning diversity: “UIC is proud to be recognized as having one of the most ethnically and culturally rich college campuses in America.” See: “About UIC”: https://pip.uic. edu/chicago/about-uic/. Accessed August 9, 2020. 44 Kim Timby in this book, 201. 45 Idem, 223. 46 See Steffen Siegel, ed., First Exposures. Writings from the Beginning of Photography (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017). 47 Kelley Wilder in this book, 307.

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Color Matters: Rethinking Photography and Race 1

Photographic matter has always been political matter. That is to say, assumptions about and expressions of power are built into the material and technological foundations of photography. This notion helps explain the remarkable regularity with which the earliest commenters on photography’s invention noticed something strange about the medium when it was applied to the human body. Exemplifying this discourse, London’s Foreign Quarterly Review ran a story in its April 1839 issue in which the author outlined the difficulties an Englishman faced when trying to reproduce an etching by Rembrandt of an old man reading. When that man placed the etching in direct contact with a photosensitive surface and exposed it to light, the disappointing result was “a reversed facsimile,” or what the journal described as “a negro face surmounted by locks of silver.”2 Countless other similar reports, on both sides of the Atlantic, remind us how troubling it was for readers at this historical juncture to learn that the new photographic processes darkened, or blackened, a white ground, as well as relied on a reversal of tone. For in the immediate wake of black emancipation in the British colonies and at the height of abolitionist activities in the United States, the social implications of bringing whites in intimate relation to blacks were hotly debated. It is therefore not surprising that early photographers looked upon possible connections between photography and the contemporary political scene with trepidation. The Euro-American idea that no subject would welcome the sight of his “negative” or “black” self was closely linked to another assumption—namely, that “white” bodies were best suited to, even designed for, photographic technologies. In the mid-nineteenth century, the specific arrangement of top and side lights that a studio photographer would employ on a given subject depended upon the relative whiteness of the sitter, for it was a face with a “rather fair complexion” and “regular features” that would imprint itself rapidly on a photographic plate and was most likely to generate a pleasing print. Dark-complexioned sitters, on the other hand, “required” lighting at a much greater intensity in order for their skin to be exposed “properly,” which often meant looking as “white” as possible.3 Early photographers working in the United

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States and Europe thus consistently approached black skin as a technical problem that necessitated skillful treatment. They faced a particular challenge, moreover, when it came to lighting a group of sitters with different complexions under the skylight. The “difficulty,” in their words, was producing a successful print without overexposing “the light-complexioned subject” or “underexposing the darker subject”— that is, without making a white body appear black and a black body appear white.4 Photographic trade journals instructed their readers to avoid such an outcome by subjecting the group to a lighting scheme tailored to the lighter bodies, removing those bodies from the picture, and then completing the exposure; or one might avoid such groupings altogether, and the extant photographic record shows that early photographers generally did. In this way, the technical requirements of the portrait studio supported prohibitions against mixing different races within the social body.5 Twentieth-century photographers around the world continued to imagine nonwhite bodies as posing technical difficulties—in professional portraits, family snaps, tourist photos, and fashion shoots. In the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, Kodak created reference cards for color photographic printing that clearly equated white skin with normalcy and beauty (fig. 1). These cards posited the ideal photographic subject as a “white” woman set against a colorful, high-contrast backdrop or frame. It was in relation to this figure’s fair complexion that skin tones in a printed photograph were measured and calibrated in North American photo labs. Kodak employees named these reference cards after “Shirley,” one of their first color-printing models, and it is her face that mass-marketed photographic technologies continue to privilege. As communications studies scholar Lorna Roth has shown, it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s, when Kodak and Polaroid expanded their international sales, that the photographic industry and its consumers began to criticize openly the ability of film emulsions to capture the “natural” appearance of all skin tones, and particularly the details of a “dark” face.6 Such criticism led Kodak “to rethink and redesign the range of its chemical representation of brown tones and to later multiracialize its Shirley card as a gesture of inclusiveness to its broadening consumer photo markets.” Reflecting on these developments, Roth makes a crucial observation: “Film emulsions could have been designed initially with more sensitivity to the continuum of yellow, brown, and reddish skin tones, but the design process would have had to be motivated by a recognition of the need for an extended dynamic range.”7 Such recognition has only emerged, and inconsistently so, in the last two decades. Today film stock can be batched by geographical region and distributed according to known preferences for skin color appearance in different parts of the world. Some manufacturers have, in fact, been reconfiguring photography’s technical specifications, adjusting the light sensitivity of film to cater to “raced” markets in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In 2006 the American trade magazine Popular Photography & Imaging profiled one of these newly designed films, Kodak’s Ultima 100, noting it was the

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1: Kodak Shirley Card, 1969, courtesy Hermann Zschiegner.

first “targeted to the skin tones and color preferences of a specific national market.” Kodak had created Ultima 100 “to perform to the specifications of the Indian skin tone,” which encompasses a broad spectrum from olive to deep brown. The magazine chose an African American model with a dark brown complexion as its test case, concluding that the new film “produced visibly more detail” in the woman’s skin than its closest American equivalent could.8 That a film accommodating a range of skin tones has not been adopted widely in the United States and Europe reminds us that whiteness continues to serve as the international norm. We have yet to achieve, in other words, Lorna Roth’s vision for large-scale technological redesign that would produce a “world in which all skin colours could matter in more just and equitable terms.”9 This reality was brought home in 2009 to users of the facial recognition and motion-tracking software installed in the Hewlett-Packard (HP) webcam. The soft-

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ware was designed to recognize a lit object and instruct the webcam to follow its movement. When trained upon a human face, the HP webcam would automatically adjust its position in order to keep that face centered within its frame. The notion that the software might have a racial bias became the subject of a short video made by American coworkers Wanda Zamen and Desi Cryer, who identify themselves on screen as a white woman (“white Wanda”) and an African American man (“black Desi”). Using their own bodies and a light sense of humor, the pair demonstrate that the motion tracking fails to function properly when a “dark” body appears before the lens. We see Wanda lurching side to side in front of the webcam mounted onto their computer monitor, its eye dutifully trained on her body. And yet when Desi inserts himself into the frame, the movement of the camera stops abruptly, fixing itself on a precise spot, despite Desi’s efforts to coax a different reaction from the device. The coworkers present these results in the video as both comical and distressing. Desi first speculates, “I think my blackness is interfering with the computer’s ability to follow me,” but then closes the video with a more definitive conclusion: “I’m going on the record and I’m saying it. Hewlett-Packard computers are racist.”10 After the video went viral on YouTube, international news agencies and online tech magazines picked up the story, reminding readers that blackness remained an unresolved photographic problem in the twenty-first century. CNN, CNBC, and other media websites shared links to the video and its provocative claim that HP’s “webcams can’t see black people.” They also reported on HP’s efforts to assuage the mounting concerns of technology-consuming Americans, efforts that included posting the following statement on HP’s corporate blog: “The technology we use is built on standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose. We believe that the camera might have difficulty ‘seeing’ contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting.” HP released another statement, reprinted in the media, assuring users that their device is “consistent with other webcams,” in that, “proper foreground lighting is required for the product to effectively track any person or their movements.” The company’s advice to users was simple and practical: change the lighting or other “optimization” settings on the camera to produce the desired results.11 In the context of the present consideration of photographic technology and its relationship to race, these statements are remarkable for several reasons. First, HP’s decision to frame its observations about its webcam in terms of collective belief (“We believe”) and possibility (“might”) suggests that the technical specifications of photographic media are themselves uncertain, even mysterious, and potentially open to interpretation. The same sentence, in which HP points to the camera’s possible difficulty “seeing,” moreover, locates the “problem” outside of the machine and within the contingent conditions surrounding it (“insufficient foreground lighting”), effectively letting the technology (and its creators) off the hook. Second, references to

Color Matters: Rethinking Photography and Race

“proper” lighting being “required” to see faces of different complexions before the camera reveal that little has changed in photographic discourse since the nineteenth century. As noted above, precisely the same words filled the pages of photographic journals and practical manuals, which trained camera operators to see bodies of certain colors as “optimal” for representation and others as demanding special treatment and, usually, intensive labor. A problem presumed as essential to the subject, in other words, became a problem for the operator charged with picturing his dark skin. Finally, HP’s recommendation to its customers to adjust the conditions of the photographic event when confronted with a subject of Desi’s complexion reinforces this view of black bodies as needing extraordinary accommodations. It further places the responsibility for such accommodation on users who choose to photograph such bodies, and thus fails to imagine digital photography as a technology that could be recalibrated to adhere to the ethical principles of diversity and inclusion. HP’s insistence that the lighting requirements of its webcam are “standard” and “consistent” with related products on the market can be easily corroborated by similar stories of photography’s alleged racism. Unfolding in the summer of 2015, one of those stories originated from Jacky Alciné, an African American programmer living in New York City. After uploading digital photos of himself and a friend, both of whom have dark complexions, Alciné discovered that the Google Photos application had labeled the subjects of the photos “gorillas,” and promptly shared this news with the world on Twitter. The Google app was designed not to track movement but to recognize a face as human or otherwise. And yet like the HP webcam, its inability to see a black body as human stemmed from the algorithms on which it relied to make sense of certain colors and patterns—formal properties determined by a design team with a “white” body in mind. Due to this social bias and a significant technical limitation, the Google app reproduced the centuries-old degradation of people of African descent as primitive, simian creatures. While the company publicly apologized for this action, Google’s decision to call it a “mistake” suggests that the reading of Alciné’s face as nonhuman by Google Photos was accidental, or that the algorithms driving the app somehow failed to function according to their design.12 We have yet to see a major manufacturer of digital technology admit that the “mistake” lies in the intentional human logic that created the product in the first place. We might say that cameras see or fail to see, in other words, because of the ways of thinking about racial difference that their users unreflectively build into them. Camera users continue to observe this failure on blogs and social media, acknowledging that photographic technologies were not designed to see their bodies.13 One photo montage, which was reposted on image-sharing sites in December 2013, offered an especially poignant reflection on the old problem of photographing bodies of different complexions. The caption on the montage—“The hardest part of being in a biracial relationship is taking a picture together”—suggests that Americans have

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made considerable progress since the nineteenth century when it was illegal in many parts of the U.S. for black people and white people to interact, let alone marry, but that photographic technology and its politics still have a long way to go. These examples from the popular media bring us to a difficult question: If photography has been, and continues to be, predicated on whiteness, how might scholars think differently about the medium as, in, or against racial politics? To begin, we must acknowledge that contemporary international artists are proposing some productive approaches to that question. Significantly, many of these artistic explorations have been developing outside of Western Europe and the United States. At a distance, they have been able to critique the global reach of Euro-American assumptions about color and racial identity, and then bring that critique “home” through major exhibitions. Consider the Brazilian photographer, Angélica Dass, and her ambitious photographic series, Humanae, which she began in 2013. Described by the artist as a perpetual work in progress, Humanae records as many skin tones as Dass can photograph—over three thousand (and counting) in South America, Europe, Africa, and the United States. Dass treats her subjects, who consist of friends and volunteers, as if they were scientific specimens, exposed before her lens. After taking digital photographs of sitters under consistent lighting conditions, she takes an 11 × 11 pixel swatch from their faces and then associates that color with one from the Pantone Matching System, which has become the international standard for color in the graphic design and fashion industries. Each photographed subject is paired with a solid backdrop that best approximates his or her flesh, chosen from among the thousands of colors in the Pantone system (fig. 2).14 In exhibitions of Humanae, the individual human color swatches are arranged into a grid based on the order in which they were photographed. Dass’s decision to order her subjects in the grid chronologically rather than according to their corresponding color swatch disrupts the traditional use of color as a determinant of one’s place within a social hierarchy—the very logic of racism. Her grids also reveal to audiences that photographic subjects cannot be simply reduced to the few colors associated with different races, which would seem to be an important first step in addressing the racial underpinnings of photographic technologies. In an interview with Foreign Affairs, Dass described this expansion of the human color wheel as a primary motivation for Humanae. “These are not our true colors,” she explained, noting that her own family consists of many colors and races. “There is no black, no yellow, no white in my work. These colors make us see each other as different, even though we are equal.”15 It is less clear, however, what kind of critique Dass might be offering of photography’s equation of skin color with identity. Does Humanae seek to affirm and celebrate that equation by labeling each of her subjects with a Pantone color code, suggesting that they might be fully knowable through or at least identified by that color? Or does the project seek to undermine that equation by breaking

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2: Angélica Dass, Humanae collage, work in progress, 2013-present, courtesy of the artist, © 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich.

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3: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (165 portraits with dodgers), detail, 2012, unique photographic hand prints on fiber-based paper, each 20.32 × 25.4 cm, courtesy of the artists, © 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich.

the bonds between (external) color and (internal) self? Dass is, after all, putting on display human variety but limiting it to what can be defined by an industrial color system whose expansion is steady by slow. Does the artist see it as a problem that her subjects are bound to this system and its technological constraints? In other words, are we meant to see the Pantone colors as confining and determining her subjects in ways that restrict their agency and individuality? Dass’s claim that she wants to create “portraits of all of the seven billion people in the world” suggests no, that she aims to reimage the Pantone system itself, forcing it to become infinitely expansive and inclusive in her hands.16 Another multimedia exhibition project, created by South-African-born, Londonbased artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, relies on the grid to rethink photography and race. To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light was displayed between 2012 and 2013 in London, Toronto, and the artists’ hometown of Johannesburg.17 The title of the exhibition invokes the euphemism Kodak used in the 1980s to describe what its new film stock could do. The “dark horse” in that phrase was, of course, the “darkness” associated with nonwhite bodies. In their display, Broomberg

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4: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (165 portraits with dodgers), 2012, unique photographic hand prints on fiber-based paper, each 20.32 × 25.4 cm, courtesy of the artists, © 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich.

and Chanarin included a grid of 165 photos of predominantly dark-complexioned men and women, almost all of whom wear body paint and what reads as “native” dress (figs. 3, 4). The sitters are united by the treatment of their bodies as types, as they adopt poses associated with the history of ethnographic photography and are inserted into a rigid typological structure (the grid). Each frame is also marked by the conspicuous inclusion of a dodging tool. A studio photographer would use such a device in the darkroom to prevent areas of a print from getting too dark; as a political metaphor, the dodging tool signals Western colonialism’s power over “others” by controlling the (in)visibility of nonwhite bodies and mapping social hierarchies onto perceptions of racial difference. Within the exhibition, Broomberg and Chanarin reproduced at large scale Kodak’s reference cards for color printing—the so-called Shirley cards. The pair thus made the history of photography’s racial bias visible; indeed, they made that bias seem strange and archaic. In Toronto, Montreal, and other Canadian cities, the enlargement of the cards to billboard size underscored their visibility and strangeness (fig. 5).18 In this form it is hard to escape the message of To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in

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5: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light, installation view, Toronto, May 2013, Gallery TPW & CONTACT Photography Festival, photograph by Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy Gallery TPW & CONTACT Photography Festival.

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6: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Strip Test 3, 2012, fibre based print, 190 × 110 cm, Saatchi Gallery, London, courtesy Saatchi Gallery, London, © Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, 2016 / 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich.

Low Light—or “the radical notion that prejudice might be inherent in the medium of photography itself.”19 Finally, the exhibition incorporated the results of Broomberg and Chanarin’s experiments in Central and South Africa with old film stock, cameras, and chemical processes. They displayed, for instance, some of the test strips they made with these outdated materials, such as the one in figure 6, revealing the labor involved in producing different degrees of whiteness and blackness in a photographic print. They further claimed that the underexposed and color-shifted image of a palm leaf in figure 7, an example of local vegetation, was the only “successful” image that they produced with the expired film. Significantly, the oddness of the subject’s color drives home the artists’ point that photographic vision is hardly natural; it is cultural and political.

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7: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Kodak Ektachrome 34 1978 frame 4, To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Ligh, 2012, C-41-print, 120 × 120 cm , courtesy of the artists, © 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich.

Throughout the project Broomberg and Chanarin kept in mind the intersection of photography and politics in South Africa. They focused on the political uses to which the South African government put Polaroid’s ID-2 camera, which was designed to create identification photos. (To make that focus explicit they included in their exhibition a rendering of that camera as a ceramic sculpture.) Like all other systems at the time, the ID-2 was calibrated for white skin, but it featured a “boost button” to increase the flash, allowing users to better delineate the features of black bodies under apartheid. A camera that could see blackness, in other words, did so in the service of oppression, making the technology itself a political weapon. Broomberg summarized this point beautifully when he explained, “Anything that comes out of that camera is a political document. If I take a shot of the carpet, that’s a political document.”20 The third contemporary art project I will consider here as a possible model for rethinking the relationship between the photographic medium and racial politics is by another white South African photographer, Pieter Hugo. Hugo is well known for making political portraits of underrepresented groups throughout Africa and has

Color Matters: Rethinking Photography and Race

8: Pieter Hugo, Pieter Hugo, 2011, archival pigment ink on Warmtone Baryta Fibre paper, 46 × 36.7 cm, courtesy Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg, © Pieter Hugo. 9: Pieter Hugo, Nandipha Mntambo (3), 2012, archival pigment ink on Warmtone Baryta Fibre paper, 46 × 37 cm, Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg, courtesy Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg, © Pieter Hugo.

explored what he calls the “failure of the South African colonial experiment.”21 In his 2011 series There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends, Hugo drew viewers’ attention to the interplay between the technologies of photography and race. He took close-up color portraits of himself (fig. 8) and friends who called South Africa home (fig. 9). Hugo then converted them to black-and-white images while manipulating the color channels of the photos. Through that process, the pigment (or melanin) of the sitters’ skin became darker and more prominent in the picture.22 Aaron Schuman describes the effect thus: “Even the slightest pigmentation in light skin is converted into charcoal tones— Hugo himself appears as an ebony bust, only his pale eyes glistening and giving the game away—and the viewer is again quite literally faced with the awkward ambiguities, inaccuracies and contradictions inherent within racial distinctions based on the surface of skin alone.”23

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Every face, Hugo shows us, contains the stuff of blackness; it remains only to be made visible by technology. In this way, There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends questions the basis of our racial distinctions, and (significantly) in a society that grew up around those distinctions. Hugo’s choice of photographic technology to raise such questions is no accident. For his manipulations deny photography a political power it has held since its conception: the power to privilege whiteness. The resulting pictures are disconcerting, eerie reminders of the medium’s dark underbelly. Like Broomberg and Chanarin, Hugo forces us to see what has long been made invisible in and by the photographic medium—blackness on the one hand, and the social construction of technology on the other. While they do not specify what can be done about the race-ing of photography moving forward, their work conjures some possibilities. For one thing, it becomes clear that the problem photography experiences in matters of race is not technical at its core. In other words, the Hewlett Packard webcam’s inability to “see” Desi Cryer’s blackness was not merely due to a glitch in the system, which requires levels of light to detect motion that Desi’s complexion could not reflect without stronger illumination. Rather, it resulted from the failure of photography’s inventors to imagine a world that values and sees more than whiteness. We have inherited and, with few exceptions, continue to reproduce that lack of imagination. It is therefore more accurate to speak of photography’s race problem as sociopolitical first and technical second. How can these ideas, modeled by contemporary art, help historians think differently about the narratives they write about photography? To begin, I want to reiterate the powerful statement communicated by the artists discussed in this essay by urging scholars to acknowledge the politics of applying photographic technology to black skin, to a surface it was literally not designed to represent. While the act of photographing a black body could serve the dominant social order, as in South Africa’s use of the Polaroid ID-2, it always had the potential to become a radical gesture, one that involved the reconfiguration of photography itself. Scholars have uncovered instances when black photographers and sitters have attempted just that, repurposing the camera for positive self-making.24 Most consistently, African American historian of photography and artist Deborah Willis has pointed to the “images of dignity, pride, success, and beauty” that challenged racist stereotypes in the second half of the nineteenth century.25 It was through studio portraiture, Willis argues, that African Americans were able to control how they were portrayed, often improving perceptions of their social class and idealizing images of their race as a whole. My point here is that we may have not yet fully acknowledged how radical that agency was. Remember that black subjects always ran up against the technical limitations of photographic operations; to use the camera as an instrument of agency when it was predicated on the presence of a light-complexioned body before the camera was nothing short of revolutionary, an extraordinary demonstration of mind over matter.

Color Matters: Rethinking Photography and Race

Historians of photography also need to attend more closely to the politics of the seemingly natural and neutral aspects of photographic practice. For, as post-structuralism has taught us, what presents itself as outside of ideology should be understood as embedded deeply within it. Film historians took this idea on board decades ago, exploring the ideological foundations of the cinematic apparatus, but it remains the rare history of photography that considers the racial politics of photographic lighting, chemistry, and the like.26 Finally, let us take a hard look at the politics of photography’s historiography, and more specifically at the ways in which the writing of photo history has adopted the white body as an ideal norm. Returning to Broomberg and Chanarin’s test strips, we find in them a metaphor for what every master narrative about photography does, largely unseen. Through invisible processes of selection and inflection photo histories have privileged whiteness. They do so, frequently and insidiously, by centering the practices of white Euro-American photographers and presenting the photography of “others” and “elsewhere” as the building blocks of “alternative” histories. This practice is, we might say, the historiographical equivalent of creating new film for “raced” markets: adjusting the settings there without rethinking the boundaries of here. We have yet to see what it would look like to destabilize or erase the center from which we write about photography, although there have been numerous calls to do just that in the last decade.27 What scholars have become quite good at is demonstrating how racial types have been constructed through photography, especially through its historical applications in anthropology. Few scholars would deny that the camera functioned as an instrument of power and control when it was focused on enslaved or colonial bodies. But few, also, would see the dark design of dominant narratives about photography or bear witness to how and why color matters in their writing. Historians might thus take a cue from artists like Dass and Hugo, who put their bodies (literally) at the center of their explorations of photography’s relationship and race, admitting their own contributions to that relationship and positioning themselves as part of a larger effort to reimagine it in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1

2

This essay incorporates material and ideas first presented at the Third International Conference of Photography and Theory 2014 in Nicosia, Cyprus, hosted by the International Association of Photography and Theory. I am grateful to Bettina Gockel for her kind invitation to present an expanded version of that talk in Zurich in October 2015, and to Deborah Willis for inspiring my writing on race and photography. [Anon.], “Photogenic Drawings,” Foreign Quarterly Review 23, no. 45 (April 1839): 213–18. For more examples of this discourse, see Tanya Sheehan, “Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography,” Photography & Culture 4, no. 2 (July 2011): 133–156.

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  3 For period discussions of photographic lighting as tailored to complexion, see R. J. Chute, “Hints Under the Skylight: The Light and the Subject,” Philadelphia Photographer 11, no. 130 (October 1874): 313–314; T. R. Williams, “Portraiture—Hints on Lighting,” Photographic Mosaics 3 (1868): 123. On the ways in which photographic technologies have privileged white skin since their invention, see Brian Winston, “A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on Ideology and the Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image,” Daedalus 114, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 105–123; Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997); Tanya Sheehan, Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), chap. 3.   4 F. N. Blake, “Photographing Groups of Persons of Different Complexions,” Photographic Mosaics 13 (1878): 129.   5 On the applications of and exceptions to this advice in late nineteenth-century America, see Sheehan, Doctored (see note 3), chap. 3.   6 Lorna Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity,” Canadian Journal of Communication 34 (2009): 117.   7 Ibid., 118.   8 Peter Krause and Russell Hart, “Local Color,” Popular Photography & Imaging 70, no. 1 (January 2006): 40–41.   9 Roth, “Looking at Shirley,” (see note 6), 128. 10 The video was posted on YouTube by wzamen01 on December 10, 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM. Accessed January 17, 2019. 11 Mallory Simon, “HP Looking into Claim Webcams Can’t See Black People.” CNN.com, December 22, 2009, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/22/hp.webcams/index.html; and Hewlett-Packard, http://www.thenextbench.com. Accessed January 17, 2019. 12 For press coverage of this story, see Jessica Guynn, “Google Photos Labeled Black People ‘Gorillas,’” USA Today, July 1, 2015, http://usat.ly/1LV9m6x; and Alistair Blair, “Google Mistakenly Tags Black People as ‘Gorillas,’ Showing Limits of Algorithms,” Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/zs2plql. Accessed January 17, 2019. 13 Especially thoughtful responses to the problem of photography’s racial bias include Syreeta McFadden, “Teaching the Camera to See My Skin: Navigating Photography’s Inherited Bias against Dark Skin,” BuzzFeed, April 2, 2014, http://www.buzzfeed.com/syreetamcfadden/ teaching-the-camera-to-see-my-skin#.ojg2r19O; and Dodai Stewart, “The Truth about Photography and Brown Skin,” Jezebel, April 3, 2014, http://jezebel.com/the-truth-about-photography-and-brown-skin-1557656792. Accessed March 22, 2016. 14 Angélica Dass, Humanae, http://humanae.tumblr.com. Accessed January 17, 2019. For links to press coverage of Humanae, see the artist’s website, http://www.angelicadass.com/press. Accessed January 17, 2019. 15 “True Colors: A Conversation with Angélica Dass,” Foreign Affairs, February 16, 2015, https:// www.foreignaffairs.com/interviews/2015-02-16/true-colors#. Accessed January 17, 2019. 16 Ibid. 17 For discussion of the exhibition, see David Smith, “‘Racism’ of Early Colour Photography Explored in Art Exhibition,” The Guardian, January 25, 2013; Brian Dillon, “Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin: To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light,” Aperture, no. 210 (Spring 2013): 134–143; and Sean O’Toole, “Making, Refusing, Remaking: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s Recent Photography,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 15, no. 2–3 (2014): 369–382.

Color Matters: Rethinking Photography and Race

18 On the 2013 National Billboard Campaign that featured the work of Broomberg and Chanarin, see Gallery TPW, http://gallerytpw.ca/exhibitions/broomberg-chanarin. Accessed January 17, 2019. 19 Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, “Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light,” http://www.goodman-gallery.com/exhibitions/311. Accessed January 17, 2019. 20 David Smith, “‘Racism’ of Early Colour Photography Explored in Art Exhibition,” (see note 17). 21 Pieter Hugo quoted in Stevenson, press release for Kin (Johannesburg, October 3 – November 8, 2013; Cape Town, October 17 – November 23, 2013), http://www.stevenson.info/exhibitions/ hugo/index_kin.html. Accessed March 22, 2016. 22 On Hugo’s process, see “Pieter Hugo,” British Journal of Photography 160, no. 7814 (July 2013): 36–41; and Aaron Schuman, “Beholder,” in Pieter Hugo, Pieter Hugo: This Must Be the Place (New York: Prestel, 2012), 219–223. 23 Aaron Schuman, “Beholder,” (see note 22), 222. 24 See, for instance, Teju Cole’s editorial, “A True Picture of Black Skin,” New York Times Magazine, February 18, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1CKSLi2. Cole discusses the efforts of twentieth-century African American photographer Roy DeCarava to picture black skin as a rich surface and explore the subtleties of darkness in his photos. 25 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Foreword,” in Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840–1999 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), ix. See also Deborah Willis, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009). 26 See Sheehan, Doctored (see note 3); and Sheehan, “Comical Conflations” (see note 2). 27 For an overview of this historiographical development, see Tanya Sheehan, “Introduction,” in Tanya Sheehan, ed., Photography, History, Difference (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 2015), 1–10.

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Encounters with Color Photography

A Personal Reflection on Colorism Photographic historian Graham Clarke asks the question, “How do we read a photograph?” in his 1997 book The Photograph. As consumers, we are used to equating blackand-white photographs with the emotional experience of reading photographic images, even though color-tinting processes became available as early as the beginning of the medium itself. In considering the “colors of photography,” my approach is to look at color photography as a paradox. “Encounters with Color Photography” explores a select grouping of photographs in multiple realms of culture: from family archives to art, news, popular media, and social media—from hand-colored images of the 1850s to contemporary color images that highlight and reflect the interests of the makers and consumers in critically analyzing and locating their presence as noted in art historical and documentary images. The essay is designed to respond to Clarke’s question as well as to introduce works that focus on nineteenth century photographic practices that posit the notion of humanity in producing and creating hand-colored images in early photography. I will also highlight rediscovered archives in public collections, as many of them have re-introduced, in the past ten years, early color photography that was created by wellknown photographers from the 1930s Farm Security Administration and others such as Gordon Parks, Bruce Davidson, and Carl Van Vechten, who were known for their black-and-white photography of an America in crisis. In 1972, I was an American photography student at the Philadelphia College of Art. I was enrolled in a color class and one of our assignments included the use of the Kodak color chart. I rarely photographed in color during that time and decided to photograph the streets in a changing neighborhood in South Philadelphia and make portraits of the people in the area. In order to practice and correct my color balance once the final print was completed I decided to photograph my two-year old niece (fig. 1). She wore a red sweater and green vest to match the vivid colors in the chart.

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1: Deborah Willis, Caran Hartsfield holding color chart, 1972.

She had reddish brown curly hair, large brown eyes, and light brown skin. I thought she would be the perfect model for my portrait assignment because of her colorful clothing and her cherub-looking face. After posing her under different light sources, I asked her to hold the color chart next to her face in order to explore the range of color within the chart under natural light. The next day I processed the film and printed the image in order to review the assignment in my studio class for a critique. I recall that my assignment was not viewed as critically successfully as I had expected among my peers in the classroom. The first response from one of my white male cohorts shocked me into silence. I recall in vivid detail his initial response. Firstly, I had the wrong model and I should have used a Shirley card. Of course I asked naively, “who is Shirley, and what is her card?” He said: “Oh you should never use a little black girl as a model.” Later, I attempted to use the Shirley card—a color reference card with a picture of a Caucasian female model, used to assist photographers in calibrating their equipment—in order to obtain the

Encounters with Color Photography

correct exposure. But the image I had presented before, of my niece, was deemed unacceptable by my peers and instructor, and that experience has remained a mystery throughout my life in photography. Thus my first encounter with and questioning of color photography was fraught with a lot of self-reflection on colorism. I was pleased to accept the invitation to present a paper at The Colors of Photography symposium at the University of Zurich in order to reconsider my personal history and introduce new histories on color images I have viewed and produced over the past forty years. So who was Shirley? In researching that question, I discovered that Shirley cards were created in the mid-1950s in the United States at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York. The company had a monopoly on color film and prints during that time for photographic industries including advertising, art, publishing, and family photography. I recall that when I was a young girl, my father had his exposed film developed and printed at the local Woolworth’s 5-cent and 10-cent store, drug store, or camera shop in our neighborhood. We were unaware that Kodak had created a special printer to develop and print color images. “‘Kodak consented to take the price of processing and printing the film out, and that meant that we needed to develop a printer that was small enough to go into small finishing labs,’ says Ray DeMoulin, who ran the company’s photo tech division at the time. Under DeMoulin’s direction, Kodak came up with its S5 printer for independent photo labs. And to make sure the colors and densities of the prints were calibrated correctly, Kodak sent a kit with color prints and original unexposed negatives ‘so that when they processed their negative, they could match their print with our print,’ DeMoulin says. ‘It was almost a foolproof operation.’ Each color print was an original shot of Shirley Page, who worked as a studio model for Kodak’s new products.”1 “They would take hundreds of pictures. And, of course, she had to have her eyes open smiling,” DeMoulin recalls.2 Thus, the iconic Shirley cards (see p. 57, fig. 1) became used as the standard for printing and beauty all over the country and/or wherever Kodak printers were used to develop prints. “The people who were producing the cards had a particular image of beauty, captured in the Shirley card,” says Lorna Roth, a media professor at Canada’s Concordia University who has researched the history of Kodak’s Shirley cards. White skin was the ideal standard of beauty for Kodak; darker skins were not considered normal or acceptable through the lens of Kodak, even though AfricanAmericans had stood in front of and behind the camera since the beginning of the medium.3 Kodak continued to use the Shirley card until 1995, when the company introduced a new skin color reference card that presented White, Asian, and Brown skin models. However, in my research I found a citation which highlighted that not until Kodak’s two biggest clients—the confectionary and furniture industries—complained

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2: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Shirley 1, To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light, 2012, billboard, 200 × 300 cm, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, installation view, FoMu, Antwerp, 2014, image courtesy the artists and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, © 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich.

that dark chocolate and dark furniture were losing out did the company come up with a solution to expand the range in color film.4 In researching the topic for this essay, I examined the work of artists and photographers who challenge the histories of color film. The first two artists I will discuss posed the provocative question “Can the camera be racist?” and attempted to answer in an exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. The compelling exhibition explored two international photographic companies: Kodak and Polaroid. The two London-based artists, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, installed oversized prints of the Shirley cards and presented an installation of images focusing on the Polaroid camera that was designed to make passbook photographs for the South African government during apartheid (fig. 2). “The light range was so narrow,” Broomberg and Chanarin argue, that “if you exposed film for a white kid, the black kid sitting next to him would be rendered invisible except for the whites of his eyes and teeth.”5 The artists spent a month in South Africa taking pictures on outdated film that had been manufactured for white subjects. They used Polaroid’s vintage ID-2 camera, which had a “boost” button to increase the flash, enabling it to be used to photograph black people for the infamous passbooks, which allowed the state to control the visibility

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and movement of black South Africans during Apartheid, from 1948 to 1994. The two socially conscious activist-artists created works in response to the activities of the 1970s Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, who protested that the Polaroid ID-2 camera and its boost button were Polaroid’s answer to South Africa’s very specific need to create photos for Apartheid passbooks. “Black skin absorbs 42% more light. The button boosts the flash exactly 42 %,” Broomberg explained. “It makes me believe it was designed for this purpose.” The exhibition To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light was on display at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg in 2013. The title of this show references a phrase used by Kodak to describe a new film stock developed in the early 1980s to address non-white faces. It has been reported that filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard refused to use Kodak film during an assignment in Mozambique in 1977, on the grounds that the film stock was inherently “racist.” I was intrigued by this assertion and began to research a number of rarely analyzed color photographs that explore this statement by Jean-Luc Godard and the Goodman Gallery exhibition in South Africa. In doing so I looked closely at activities of Ken Williams and Caroline Hunter in the Polaroid Anti-Apartheid Demonstration with the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM). Williams

3: Ken Williams of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement handing out flyers at an anti-Apartheid demonstration, 1971, © The Boston Globe, courtesy of Have You Heard From Johannesburg.

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was one of two African-American employees at Polaroid who formed the PRWM in 1970. Figure 3 shows Williams with a “Boycott Polaroid” poster. The PRWM was in favor of a boycott of the Polaroid when the workers became aware of the connection with passbooks in South Africa. Subsequently, in 1971, Williams and two other employees were fired by Polaroid.6 As mentioned earlier, hand-tinting and coloring were popular at the beginning of photography dating back to the Daguerreotype. Hand color/tinting was used to create a sense of realism for an image, adding red color to accentuate rosy cheeks or a hint of color to a dress or flag. I would also argue that it instilled a sense of humanity

4: Holmes, Booth & Haydens, African-American Woman with Two White Children, 1860s, hand-colored ambrotype, ¼ plate, Stephan Loewentheil Photograph Collection, #8043, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

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or actual experience to each subject. For example, look closely at the hand colored ¼ plate ambrotype of a young black woman holding two white children. The image was made by photographers Holmes, Booth & Haydens in the 1860s (fig. 4). The photograph is assumed to be significant for both the photographers and their clients. The two white children’s cheeks are painted red, the little girl’s earrings are tinted with gold, and the enslaved woman’s dress is slightly tinted, while her broach pinned at the collar is fully colored, enhancing the beauty of the portrait. Another American Civil War era ambrotype portrait of a possibly self-emancipated woman who performed work as a washerwoman for the Union Army in Richmond,

5: Portrait of a Washerwoman for the Union Army in Richmond, Virginia with an American flag pinned to dress, between 1862 and 1865, ambrotype, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Virginia was made in the 1860s (fig. 5). This striking portrait shows the hand-painted red, white, and blue American flag pinned to her dress. Few personal documents, such as photos or diaries, exist of nineteenth-century laundresses and other working-class women, and the intent behind the painting of the patriotic colors of the American flag creates a meaningful story about its use as a signifier in photographs

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6: Unidentified young soldier in Union uniform holding Colt revolving rifle in one hand and resting the other hand on a table, between 1861 and 1865, sixth-plate tintype, hand-colored, 9.2 × 8.0 cm (case), Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 7: Unidentified African ­American boy standing in front of painted backdrop showing American flag and tents, between 1861 and 1865, sixth-plate tintype, 9.8 × 8.8 cm (case), Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Encounters with Color Photography

of the Civil War. Both ambrotypes, in my view, clearly show the pride of the sitters and their sense of self during a tumultuous time in American history. Ambrotype and tintype portrait studios flourished during the Civil War as images became more and more affordable. Free and bonded black soldiers posed in itinerant studios that were set up temporarily near the army camps. White soldiers visited photographic studios before they joined the war; some carried the images while others sent their portraits to their families and loved ones. Many were hand-colored to indicate the color of the uniforms—blue for the Union soldiers and grey for Confederate soldiers (figs. 6, 7). The United States Library of Congress and National Archives are important resources when researching the history of photography and it is important to highlight the research conducted on the collections they have acquired over the years. The young sailor posed in front of a naval-themed painted backdrop in a professional photo studio (fig. 8). The soldier paid an extra fee to have the flag carefully hand-colored.

8: Unidentified young sailor in Union uniform with American flag in front of backdrop showing naval scene, between 1861 and 1865, approximate half-plate tintype, hand-colored, 15.2 × 12.1 cm (case), Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, ­Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 9: Hiram Lazier, Helen Amelia Loguen, around mid-1860s, hand-colored, courtesy of the Onondaga Historical Association, Syracuse, NY.

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In the North, the price of ambrotypes and tintypes ranged from 25 cents for the smallest images to $2.50 for the largest. In today’s dollars, these portraits would cost anywhere from approximately $6.00 to $60.00. In the South during the war, there were fewer opportunities to sit for a portrait. Commercial portrait photographers and photographic supplies were frequently not available. A few Southern photographers held on to their businesses by raising prices to compensate for the high price of photographic supplies and the inflated Confederate dollar.7 The hand-colored photograph is an important link to contemporary photographic practices. Stephan Loewenthiel, a collector of rare nineteenth-century photographic images and albums, curated an exhibition on the use of early color at Cornell University Libraries. He argues that “hand coloring helped to democratize an important status symbol of the time. The painted portrait had long been the exclusive privilege of the economic or social elite. Middle and working class families could now afford to have ‘painted’ portraits of themselves and their loved ones. Folk art portraiture, far from disappearing as a result of photography, embraced the new medium of photography, helping both to flourish in the form of the hand-colored portrait.8 The hand-colored photograph of the free black woman Helen Amelia Loguen is in the collection of the Onondaga Historical Association (fig. 9). At the time this photograph was made, Loguen was the fiancée of abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s eldest son, Lewis Henry Douglass, who was a soldier in the Civil War with the 54th Massa­ chusetts Volunteer Infantry. Douglass was a sergeant major, the highest rank an ­African-American could hold, and he and Helen exchanged letters about the war and photographs of each other. Discharged from the army in 1864 because of a medical disability, Douglass married Helen in 1869. Hand-colored images continued to make an impact in photography through the mid-1930s in family portrait-making, as male photographers hired women to hand-tint and add color to commissioned portraits. Women photographers working during this time also used this skill to enhance the essence of their sitters.

Entering the Twentieth Century This section presents a “gallery” of photographs highlighting some of the most iconic photographers and important photographic collections in the U.S. Over the last five years a number of archives, both public and private, have been publicizing color photographic collections that were previously unknown to the artistic and general public, among them Yale University’s Beinecke Library, the Gordon Parks Foundation, and the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Collection. With the introduction of these collections to the general public, all received critical reviews in major news

Encounters with Color Photography

10: Carl Van Vechten, Billie Holiday with her dog, 1949, image courtesy of Carl Van Vechten Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, © Van Vechten Trust.

outlets and organized traveling exhibitions focusing on the Farm Security Administration, Carl Van Vechten, Gordon Parks, and Jack Delano’s color photography. Carl Van Vechten’s 1949 photograph of the iconic singer Billie Holiday with her dog, Mister, is a color print from a Kodachrome slide, a Kodak product that became available in 1938 (fig. 10). Writer and photographer Van Vechten created an endearing and powerful intimate moment between the red-lipped singer and her bejeweled and beloved Pit Bull. The colors are both muted and vibrant.

11: Jack Delano, At the Vermont state fair, Rutland, 1941, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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12: Gordon Parks, Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, courtesy and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.

Farm Security Administration photographer Jack Delano’s 1941 photograph of young girls wearing red print dresses and a little boy dressed in blue is a strikingly and beautifully framed narrative of an American family gathering at the Vermont County Fair in the small town of Rutland (fig. 11). The iconic red and blue dominate the dusky tracks at the fair. Delano underscores the handicraft of the dressmaker, possibly the mother of the children, by centering the portrait of the family as one unit, emphasizing the dressmaker’s use of color to evoke American patriotism. Gordon Parks devised both spectacular and subtle poses to tell stories about injustices, family life, work, and the fashion industry. During the 1950s and 1960s, Parks worked on his own photographic projects and was also employed by interna-

Encounters with Color Photography

13: Bob Adelman, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King Outside Montgomery on the Fourth Day of the Selma March, Alabama, Route 80, 1965, © Bob Adelman.

tional and domestic picture and fashion magazines, such as Life, Vogue, and Ebony. He was hired to cover local and world events with his camera—news, domestic life, civil and human rights struggles, and culture. The photo of the red neon sign lit up with the words “COLORED ENTRANCE” outside of a segregated movie theater in Mobile, Alabama (fig. 12) is one that highlights the disparity between how white and black Americans lived in the South. The neon blue arrow guides the viewer to a door that is separate from the one for white patrons. In the photograph a young Joanne Wilson, wearing a light dress, stands with her niece on a Sunday afternoon outside the Saenger Theatre. Ironically, this photograph was not featured in Parks’s 1956 Life magazine story, “A Separate Way of Life.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King were photographed by photographer Bob Adelman while leading a protest march near Montgomery, Alabama on March 4, 1964 on Route 80 (fig. 13). Red, white, and blue, the American flag—symbolizing freedom—waves freely through the frame. Dr. King’s blue shirt is soaked with raindrops as the clouds loom in the background. The photographs of the Ghanaian/UK-based photographer James Barnor focus on models in his Accra-based studio and on a street in London, highlighting his use of Agfa film (figs. 14, 15). In the 1960s, Barnor was recruited and trained as a represen-

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14: James Barnor, Drum cover girl Rosemarie Thompson, London, 1967, courtesy Autograph ABP. 15: James Barnor, Untitled #4, Sick-Hagemeyer shop assistant, Accra, 1971, courtesy Autograph ABP.

Encounters with Color Photography

tative for Agfa-Gavaert in the UK and Ghana, using their color film for advertising as well as for taking photographs for cultural and political magazines such as Drum. Barnor was born in Accra, Ghana, in 1929 and began work as a photographer in the city’s Jamestown district in 1947, where he set up the Ever Young studio, taking photographs of the local community. After spending the 1960s in Britain, Barnor returned at the end of the decade to Ghana, where he helped open the country’s first color-processing laboratory.

16.1–16.5: Sheila Pree Bright, Plastic Bodies series (selection), 2003, inkjet print, 76.2 × 70 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Color Photography in the Twenty-first Century Visualizing the politics of beauty and the black body has contributed to a broader conversation, whereby not only black photographers but also white photographers have expanded the visual dialogue that beauty matters. Sheila Pree Bright uses girl culture, child’s play, desire, and fashion to create a visual narrative about beauty. She often uses our collective memory of women and girls to locate aesthetic imagery in

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social history. The dramatic growth in black women’s photographic practices in the latter part of the twentieth century was, in part, born out of the civil rights movement in America, during which artists consciously created images of their individual communities and became interpreters of their own experiences. For a number of years, she contextualized images with the politics of beauty and the black female body. For over five years she has been among the few black women artists working today exploring and contextualizing beauty with the use of color photography. She began to look at cultural icons in popular culture and found that the Barbie doll had a major impact on women of a certain age group, specifically on those born after 1959. Ruth Handler, a co-founder of Mattel, invented the Barbie doll in 1959. The doll was intended to be a teenage fashion doll. There has been a lot of controversy about Barbie’s figure, particularly when studies indicated that if Barbie were a real person her measurements would be an impossible 36-18-38 (bust-waist-hips, in inches). Ethnic Barbies were introduced much later. Bright commented that “this distortion weighs heavier when looking specifically at the impact of Barbie on girls and women of color.”9 She later expanded her project and began photographing multi-ethnic Barbie dolls. The project, titled Plastic Bodies (figs. 16.1–16.5), visually examines the authenticity of female beauty projected by media and advertisers. Her work also references a sense of beauty and pain. It is quiet, serene, and imagines a Barbie doll lost in a time-travel machine. She looks at moments of girlhood and consumer culture. Bright is concerned with the unseen and aware of the history of the desire for white dolls and the rejection of black dolls in sociological studies and in the playroom. Bright uses humor, fear, and fashion to frame a visual narrative about the politics of identity and beauty. She began to recognize how iconic toys in popular culture, such as the Barbie doll, have had a major impact on American girls (black, white, Asian, Latina, and First Nation) from 1959 until today. The goal of the portrait project was to show the impact that media and advertising have had in defining beauty for girls and women of color; and how Barbie has been the main source for many young girls of a single standard of beauty through the body of a manufactured doll: white, thin, blue-eyed, and blonde. As an activist-artist living in the South, Bright questioned the loss of identity for young black girls as she photographed them in her home city of Atlanta. She began to use her camera to challenge conventional ideals of beauty. Bright understands the concept of plasticity as she transforms the physical face with the idealized in morphing the faces of her live models with plastic models. Bright recognizes subtleties in color and composition, and how variations in hair texture and eye color can be desired. She does not want us to repress our discomfort; she commands us to look closely as she produces life-size prints. Bright’s brown-skinned Barbies are fashionably dressed, with hairstyles from locks to bangs. Color photography and beauty are essential to Omar Victor Diop’s portraiture. The history of the African diaspora is important to his oeuvre. Diop combines self-

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portraiture with art historical references, contemporary art, and activism in his approach to creating images. In doing so he references a broader global history to his practice: beauty, media, advertising, fashion, and sports. Iconicity, performance, and photography are explored through his interests in the references to beauty as well as the interplay between fact and fiction, identity and history. I find it exciting to see the portraits imagined through Diop’s camera lens. The discourse of absence and ­historical memory are central in these heroic figures. Inspired by fashion history, dress, and masculine poses, Diop stands in front of the camera to embody black historical figures, men such as abolitionist Frederick Douglass (fig. 17). He says:

17: Omar Victor Diop, Frédérick Douglass – series “Diaspora”, 2015, inkjet print, 90 × 90 cm, © Omar Victor Diop, courtesy gallery MAGNIN-A, Paris.

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“I lived every self-portraiture session like a pilgrimage… Inviting these forgotten souls into our present times felt like […] allowing these historical figures to continue a discourse that they started during their lifetime. This project is about memory, celebration, but it’s also about justice and recognition.”10 Diop mines art museums and their archives in imaginative ways to engage in histories often lost in the global narrative on black people. When I asked Diop when he became fascinated with images of black figures in Western art history he responded: “It started with me wanting to look at these historical black figures who did not fulfill the usual expectations of the African diaspora insofar as they were educated, stylish and confident, even if some of them were owned by white people and treated as the exotic other. Individuals such as Albert Badin, a Swedish court servant in the 18th century or Juan de Pareja, who was a member of Velázquez’s household in the 17th century, I wanted to bring these rich historical characters into the current conversation about the African diaspora and contemporary issues around immigration, integration and acceptance. I was fascinated by the way classical painters such as Velázquez crafted directional sunlight around the faces of their sitters, and was looking to find examples of portraits of black people, to see how I could draw inspiration from them. I came across a few paintings, such as Jean Baptiste Belley’s portrait by Girodet and after a while, I felt the need to know more about the stories behind these dignified black sitters. That’s how the journey began. I was really moved by what I discovered.” Born in Dakar, Diop lives today in two cities—Dakar and Paris. Diop became interested in photography as a young man. He views his work as a personal journey through his interaction with mediated images. In my view, humanity is central in his exploration. Photographer Zalika Azim’s interest in the black family archive focused on migratory patterns of black life and specifically the photographs she discovered which had been taken by her grandmother, who was a photographer. Since 2009 she has been working on archival and photographic materials that transform into art installations and sculptural pieces. The projects are based on an earlier installation titled Memories Unspoken (2014). She writes: “I knew my grandmother, Mary E. Lemons, as a woman of few words, maybe it was due to her age and my being a teenager too caught up in my own life that she took on the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ motto. Did I ever ask? She passed away in 2009, she was 74; I was 19. Our lives were separate and yet so close. I felt I knew her, but had no clue who she was as an individual. In an attempt to know her history I began clear out the apartment that she had occupied for nearly 40 years, I took on the

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responsibility of caring for the things my grandmother left behind. It was in the cleaning, dismantling and packing away of my grandmother’s home that I realized exactly how she made use of the walls, couches, tables, window-sills, dresser drawers and armoire, entrusting them with her memories, stories, youth, and all the other things of her past. It was also at this time that I found a steamer chest containing birth, death and marriage certificates, awards, letters, trinkets, an array of cameras and a suitcase of photographs of which I later learned were all primarily taken by my grandmother. I attempted recalling my own memories of seeing my grandmother with a camera in hand. None of those memories go past me being 7 years old. The pictures, most of which I had never been granted access to, told stories of the accumulated memories in which my grandmother was photographer, artist, curator, collector and archivist, but one who did not consider herself as such. Photography as a visual diary has acted to narrate stories and further works as an exploratory method in learning to see, sense and reflect on the world both tangible and indefinable. My grandmother moved with her family to Brooklyn, New York from Aiken, South Carolina when she was roughly 16 years old. While establishing herself in the north, my grandmother regularly visited neighborhood photo studios—especially on occasions such as Passover, Easter and birthdays—

18: Zalika Azim, Untitled (Botany Bay), 2016, archival photograph mounted on inkjet print, 66.04 × 96.52 cm, courtesy of the artist.

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in efforts to keep relatives and friends abreast of her wellbeing. Exchanging photos became a means to share the dream of progression, while also allowing individuals to redefine themselves as they saw fit. The stories I re-discovered form part of a larger story, not only of my grandmother’s life but of the countless families who moved north, and others, who have captured, retained and developed new legacies through photography.”11 In looking at these photographs I am fascinated with the freedom Azim’s grandmother presented in making photographs of beautifully dressed women and smartly dressed men. They used their clothing as signifiers of their status and their sense of self. The photographs range in size and are stylized in the way they were framed, matted, or mounted in albums. Women appear self-assured in front of the camera. Her current project includes photographs placed within color landscape portraits of South Carolina’s low country (fig. 18). The photographic project is a culmination of family stories, incorporating imagined narratives based on the absent details of these stories, and her own memories of visiting the south with her father when she was a young girl. She writes: “Throughout the series, I include framed family photographs and objects which will be instinctively placed and made to overlay the landscapes.”12

Conclusion Coloring with oil and the use of color chemicals inspired photographers and the consumers of the images to reinvent and imagine new narratives which enhanced the medium. Intersections of the development and use of color technologies—film to chrome—with National Geographic, the United States Government’s New Deal Farm Security Administration, Life magazine’s photographs of the segregated Alabama in the U.S. and representations of urban life will also be considered in my presentation on race and representation in color photography. This essay is framed to look at specific images of interest to me as a curator. The images are both personal and reflect my interest in historical narratives about how color photography explores politics and the changing times in photography. Color gives another expression to the imagery. My varied interests in color photography are shaped by the accessibility of storytelling and documentation of the experiences of color images within the family photograph; as well as by how color photography inspired documentary and art photographers to take liberties with a new technology to enhance and create a specific experience.

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Notes   1 Mandalit del Barco, “How Kodak’s Shirley Cards Set Photography’s Skin-Tone Standard,” in NPR (November 13, 2014): http://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-sshirley-cards-set-photography-s-skin-tone-standard?sc=17&f=1019&utm_ source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app. Accessed January 19, 2019.   2 Ibid.   3 Syreeta McFadden, “Light and Dark: The Racial Biases that Remain in Photography (Interview),” Code Switch. Race and Identity Remixed (April 16, 2014): http://www.npr.org/sections/ codeswitch/2014/04/16/303721251/light-and-dark-the-racial-biases-that-remain-in-photography. Accessed January 19, 2019.   4 David Smith, “‘Racism’ of Early Colour Photography,” Dawn (January 27, 2013): http://www. dawn.com/news/781524/racism-of-early-colour-photography. Accessed January 19, 2019.   5 Ibid.   6 In 1970, Caroline Hunter, a young chemist working for the Polaroid Corporation, stumbled upon evidence that her multinational employees were indirectly supporting apartheid. With the collusion of local distributors Frank & Hirsch, Polaroid was able to provide the ID-2 camera system to the South African state, to efficiently produce images for the infamous passbooks. The camera included a boost button designed to increase the flash when photographing subjects with dark skin and two lenses which allowed for the production of a portrait and profile image on the same sheet of film. By 1977, Polaroid withdrew from South Africa, and the international divestment movement—which contributed to the end of apartheid—was on its way. The radical notion that prejudice might be inherent in the medium of photography itself is interrogated by the artists Broomberg & Chanarin in their exhibition of these works produced in South Africa on salvaged Polaroid ID-2 systems.   7 Library of Congress, “Photographers and their Studios,” in The Last Full Measure: Civil War Photographs from the Liljenquist Family Collection: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-war-photographs/photographers-and-their-studios.html. Accessed January 19, 2019.   8 Cornell University, “Hand-colored Photography,” in Dawn’s Early Light: The First 50 Years of Photography: http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/DawnsEarlyLight/exhibition/handcolored/. Accessed January 19, 2019.   9 Interview with the artist in August 2016. See also: Sheila Pree Bright, “Plastic Bodies”: https://www.sheilapreebright.com/gallery. Accessed January 19, 2019. 10 Email message to author September 9, 2016 from Omar Victor Diop. 11 Email message to author August 8, 2015 from Zalika Azim. 12 Email message to author August 10, 2015 from Zalika Azim.

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The Color of Photography: The Covenant of Paul Strand

The Return of the Repressed In the old debate between disegno and colorito, color was always distinctly on the side of feeling.1 Feeling, as a modern platform or ideology, posed a challenge to the equally modern surety of design’s reason by calling it up short for its imperious entitlement and the violent enforcement of its peculiar rules. As one postmodern partisan referred to colorito’s Baroque afterlife, for example, “The colorists threatened the mastery of discourse as much as the favor of drawing, the hegemony of a metaphysical conception of the image as well as the primacy of the idea in representation. They attacked the principles of morality and the pedagogical virtues of rules alike. Brash, they defended the purely material qualities of representation. Indecent, they advanced an apology for cosmetics, pleasure, and seduction. Libertine, they praised color for the incomparable effects that its simulacra produced.”2 Such feeling-forward programs threaten with an arrogance of their own that rivals or even exceeds reason’s hubris, of course, but this essay will risk color’s excess by keeping it at the center of both its subject and its form. From its beginning, photography has always been in search of local color even as it has sought to freeze the flow of experience and put it into boxes. Something similar is true for writing, too, as it has drifted away from the desire-driven storytelling of old and conformed to the affective comportment of science’s mimesis and ekphrasis. Put very differently, at the heart of my concern with the battle between color and design is the ongoing struggle between Judaism and Protestantism—or more generally between the otherness of difference and the self-othering uniformity of the commodity form. My model is Theodor Adorno, who took that struggle to be the crux of modern essay writing itself. Essays are driven to express “what is loved and hated

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instead of presenting the mind as creation ex nihilo on the model of an unrestrained work ethic,” he insisted. At their best, essays reach for emancipation from the commodity’s “compulsion of identity,” by drawing on difference’s “moment of something inextinguishable, of indelible color.”3 The essay’s claim in the name of the local color of the essayist is nothing more than desire, in other words, just as the colorists always imagined it to be: it both fleshes out the lines and rules laid down by the designers and spills over into an extralegal, suprareasonable territory of its own. Of course, it should go without saying that such overflowing desire is as much a threat as it is a promise: it promises the recognition of difference that we all need but equally so it threatens to undermine the law that would connect that same recognition to justice. As much as we might like to feel otherwise, any historical record will tell us that, in the end, justice only ever exists for difference under the rule of law. While the historic battle between disegno and colorito was first and foremost about art, we would be derelict not to recall that it was also a struggle for cultural dominance between patrons—generally, that is, between the bankers of Florence and the merchants of Venice. Bankers need and demand conformity to rules, and they need political entities with access to the legitimate use of force to backstop those rules. Merchants benefit from those provisions too, of course, but they also rely on their capacity to loosen social and cultural norms to open up new markets and sell more stuff. There is no need to illustrate the connection between Florence and the rigid underlying pictorial rule of disegno’s linear perspective, but we might quickly acknowledge the revolution in Venice by pointing to Titian’s reworking of traditional patterns of both patronage and pictorial style that, as Tom Nichols tells us, “effectively reversed the precedence traditionally given to the pictorial needs of the Republic itself” by actively reconceiving both his own role as a businessman and that of his patrons as “the expansion of individualistic values into the public domain.”4 Colorito offered the sparkling intricacies and luscious particularities of difference as a means of doing business against disegno’s stolid foundation for the new homogeneous, universal reason of the emergent capitalist economy. As Europe and its influence advanced from the Renaissance through the Baroque and into the modern and particularly postmodern periods, colorito has evermore triumphed and become the new disegno. Increasingly during this process the capacity to give form to “the pictorial needs of the Republic itself” has given sway to the expression of self and community in the public realm. Along the way, Jewishness, as Europe’s pivotal cipher of difference, emerged as a universal norm: “Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth,

The Color of Photography: The Covenant of Paul Strand

and both wealth and learning for their own sake. It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefit of individuals, nuclear families, and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.”5 Everyone becoming Jewish, as Yuri Slezkine puts it, is also about the repression of Jewishness as local color, about its becoming merely inexpressive design “on the model of an unrestrained work ethic,” as Adorno had it. The work of Communist and Jewish American photographer Paul Strand stands at the center of this drama, for my purposes, as a marker of that loss—that is, as the Jewishness that became Protestantism suppressing itself—and its return as a once-vanished or once-repressed mediator. It is the rediscovery of that mediating function—and its capacity to address us directly, resolutely, unsparingly as colorito speaking to disegno on disegno’s own terms—that is at the heart Strand’s photography as art (fig. 7).

Chromatopsia Let me begin with a longish poem, James Scully’s searing 1984 Lumpen! If:6 capitalism kills it’s not always with a bullet into a black, not always a radiated worker high on grass, packing an old atomic sub reactor in concrete, for burial at sea, not always, even, in boxes of boys stiff as marines it kills naturally, its murders are suicides accidents or justifiable homicides, most don’t appear to happen, even if you aren’t laid off for life cut off

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how can you make ends meet the flat jammed who wouldn’t scream at husband wife kids one kid yelling down the street I’m gonna bust that fuckin spic the girl shy to the point of torment, scratching at dirt a third faking karate grooves superhuman concentration, who wouldn’t blow brains out to alcohol drugs soap operas TV football music music music motorcycles quick lays stereo on the porch, out the window, in cases, rip offs betrayals whiplash comebacks not that there are not good times too the car up on cinder blocks months on end, working it over with a beer in the slow, close sun of a Saturday afternoon though no one in the beginning chose to live this way no one wanted to crash racing around and around, just to get on, to not to be rust, used up, over whelmed by this system whatever it is this gelatinous mass murder, in which they are more and more stuck turning more colorful, sporting more flagrant heraldic tattoos, Christ’s head on his bicep, the blue butterfly alighting at her shoulder, this in which they are

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moving yet still in colorful clothes, colorful language, ever more colorful freedoms that don’t fly, deaths that hardly ever got out alive from this atrocity where the man beats the woman breaking glass in the night this agony, where they are beautiful yet hurtful to look on like a live wire, broken crackling and dancing dangerous in the street going nowhere

1: United States Federal Housing Authority Home Owner’s Loan Corporation residential security map of Chicago and north and west suburbs, 1939.

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I don’t know how you feel about this poem but I both love and hate it. I love its guileless conviction that structural or systemic or “gelatinous” violence is murderous, that the distinctively abstract manner of thinking and being brought to life by the commodity form is violence unto death. I love that it makes us mindful of the softer day-to-day colors of violence implicit in redlining maps, such as that created by the Federal Housing Authority in 1939 (fig. 1) halfway through Chicago’s chromographic transition from 2% to 33% black, for example—death’s color here is red on black, we might say—or explicit in this harder 1898 correlation between immigrant populations and infant mortality in Chicago’s Stock Yard and Hyde Park districts (fig. 2)—the color of death is now something like the shading or soiling of white.7 I love that it reminds us of that ancient epoch when it seemed completely reasonable to speak without reservations of a fully “scientific” socialism and act single-mindedly according to a just and inevitable telos of history; or of that more recent antiquity when we could fully identify ourselves with “the Movement,” rage unselfconsciously against “the Man,” and act with all earnestness according to that one-part-enlightening and twoparts-scary slogan “the personal is the political.” I love the reaching prosaic strain you can hear in the poem’s baleful defense “who wouldn’t scream / at husband wife kids” or in its woeful romance with “this agony, where they are beautiful / yet hurtful to look on.” I love that a condition so seemingly benign as “colorful clothes, colorful language, ever more colorful / freedoms that don’t fly” is understood to have the

2: Charles J. Bushnell, Map No. 5 Stock Yard & Hyde Park Districts of Chicago Showing Distribution of Foreign Population and Child Mortality in A.D. 1898, 1901, illustration in The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 7, No. 4, Newberry Digital Collections for the Classroom, courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago.

The Color of Photography: The Covenant of Paul Strand

potential to be as fully death-riddled as “a bullet / into a black” or boys in boxes “stiff as marines.” This brash way with artlessness strikes me as artful in a distinctly modernist and particularly American way. Among other consequences, I take such a manner to have been a cultural prerequisite for the U.S.-centered form of thinking and feeling that arose during the long 1960s and led to, among other things, the new left revolt against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other biases as forms of structural violence. To this day, as we all know well, that revolt has been waged successfully or not on behalf of a kind of chromophilia, a love for and defense of the rich and varied hues of cultural difference, and against the pallid and uniform denial of such variation by chromophobia, or a fear and consequent suppression of difference as such—a fear that came to be associated with, among other things, the sometimes explicit but always implicit universalizing humanism of midcentury black-and-white photography. Most of all, I love that it extends the promise of that historic uprising beyond its residual forms of structural subordination rooted in the colorful patriarchal and agrarian past to those emergent forms of universalizing gray-on-gray exploitation spawned from the apparatus of the modern technopolitical beast itself, whose long-cultivated chumpvanguard is the so-called “creative class.” “Capitalism kills,” the poem tells us from the early years of neoliberalism’s triumph, leaving us to call to mind more recent terms for this violence, such as “globalization,” or “precariatization,” or, perhaps most simply, “the demise of the middle class.” What I hate about the poem also strikes me as very American but is perhaps more postmodern than modernist. I hate that it sounds like a song by Janis Joplin or maybe Amy Winehouse (if we take her blues-inflected pop music to be partially or honorarily American in the manner we often attribute to the Rolling Stones, say, or Eric Clapton). I hate that its imagery oscillates between suffering and romance, between blues and pop, between the vulnerable use value of life and the defenseless exchange value of consumption. I hate that the poem, like the pop traditions it draws from, actively produces its own disempowerment by bringing identity and difference under modernity’s chromo-economic sign of intersectionality or equivalent difference rather than reaching for its achromatic political sign of common cause. I hate that it culturalizes and vulgarizes class with its drugs, music, and motorcycles, its beer and cars up on cinder blocks, and color generally as its foregrounded expression of taste. I hate that it is just inches from an advertisement, or a pop song, or a poem repurposed for an advertisement, or from kitsch in Clement Greenberg’s enduring sense of that which creates “the illusion that the masses actually rule.”8 I hate that it casts itself with, as Theodor Adorno put it in 1969, “the human rights of those who foot the bill for culture” in such a way that “the stigmas of degradation” are dedicated to memory “in the form of an image.”9 As we know all too well, the sometimes well-meaning but always inadequately compensatory (if not out-and-out exploitative) politics of recog-

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nition that our contemporary image world trades in—“kitsch politics,” we might even call it following Greenberg—is itself routinely distilled down to a dehumanized chromophilia, whether in the shiny, vertiginous mirror reflections of consumption or the dingy, vorticular effacement of death. Needless to say, it is this way with images more than anything else that we now buy and sell. In other words, by crossing over from what I love about this poem—its black-andwhite understanding of structural violence—into what I hate about it—its chromophilic reification of suffering in the futility of images—the poem enacts the very same killing that it laments. The risk it courts, in the end, is drawing us down into the isolation and self-abrogation of capitalism’s depressive position, the experience of one’s own subjectivity in the objecthood of the commodity form with all the accompanying formations of manic reactions. Nina Simone once noted melancholically that Janis Joplin “got hooked into a thing, and it wasn’t on drugs;” it was “a feeling and she played to corpses”—a thingliness or tool-being or violence of structural immediacy that Joplin herself famously lamented when she said “On stage, I make love to 25,000 different people, then I go home alone.” Like her pop classic “Down on Me,” for example, or Amy Winehouse’s mega-hit “Back to Black,” in other words, the poem risks losing itself narcissistically in its own colorful poiesis, or adapting itself to the world by assuming the form of an image, and thus never getting to aisthesis, or its bodily apperception of the abstraction or institutionality or purposiveness necessary to effectively fend off the threat of structurally-realized death. There is nothing particularly honorable about that common sense given to us when we adopt the removed vantage of maps, spreadsheets, fine art, and other tools of our trade as buyers and sellers of goods and services or purveyors in the circulation of ideas. But it is a reprieve from the depressive position inflicted on us by the chaotic social being and violent immediacy of the commodity itself—the being that comes to mind when we think of those horrid paparazzi photographs of Joplin on a tear or Winehouse after a binge, the being which is bought and sold like a pink boa or black eye shadow or a white wifebeater or a pop star’s florid emotional life or her narcochromatically-confused body rendered pasty blue like an spoiled piece of meat.10 In the end, however, I love the poem more than I hate it, or, rather, I love that I both love and hate it. What saves it from slipping all the way over to the abject chromophilia of a pop song, for me, is expressed most concisely in its artful title “Lumpen! If.” The exclamation mark romantically extends human suffering into the image’s depressive position of identity as equivalent difference while the “If” manically pulls us back self-critically from the brink of the image to the material relationality that produced the dream of romantic fusion and its overextension as a symptomatic response in the first place. That is to say, it pulls us up from the depths of chromophilia’s self-lumpenization to the horizon of political-economic reflection about how capitalism kills—to the black-and-white vantage point of the sociologist who made

The Color of Photography: The Covenant of Paul Strand

the Progressive-era map about immigrant populations and infant mortality (fig. 2), for example, or to the rational calculus of the consumer or producer—and thus momentarily out of the naturalized abyss of the death of the commodity itself.11 Don’t get me wrong—this is not to imagine that we can escape such an unseemly fate ourselves, that we have an easy out from such self-lumpenization, such self-commodification, such self-chromaticization, such self-abjection, such being-unto-death. Rather, my hope for what follows is to find that horizon or tipping point between the god-like gray-on-gray or soiled-white analytical understanding of the sociologist or consumer and the abject fully colorized death of the pop icon—that is, between the perspective of the buyer or seller, on the one hand, and the perspective of the bought and sold commodity itself, on the other. It is only by risking the lumpen vulgarity, violence, fusion, and nonbeing of death—risking, that is, the sublime back-to-black or down-on-me power of identity and difference as color, as abstract and equivalent exchangeable currency outside of one’s own control, as commodity-being itself—that anything valuable in our age is ever said or done. Everything else is either preaching to the choir or deluding ourselves, or, even worse, it is selling our wares to one dupe or another—to gullible colleagues, deans, or promotion committees, say, or to a classroom full of students, or an arts patron or museum audience, or, worse still, to the public at large.

3: GDP per capita in various parts of the world, 0-2000 A.D., table in the article by Derek Thompson, The Economic History of the Last 2000 Years: Part II, The Atlantic, June 20, 2012.

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The commodity form, after all, has truly miraculous powers (fig. 3) and it would be foolish and absurd to underestimate them. As Marx noted, for example, it has produced wondrous things “far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.”12 At its most rudimentary level the commodity form is simply collective economic activity, he said, or “the social characteristics of men’s own labor,” even if it is a kind of dead or unselfconscious labor. Like anything else, those “social characteristics” have a history or process of becoming, and we might pause to note the three pivotal moments marked on our graph of the long durée of commodity-formalization just to ground us in the material world we find ourselves in today: the development of the modern bookkeeping system circa 1500, the modern factory system circa 1800, and the modern consumer credit system circa 1950. Each in its own way was a child of the mother form of money itself and as such a matter of making first productive and then consumptive activity economic, of making material activity abstract, of making human activity cyborg-like. That is to say, each one homogenized heterogeneous interests, thereby creating conceptual and affective distance from the human relations that are the living activity underwriting any such productivity. Each made us into chumpish chromophiles, whose colors are made to blossom through the calculations and machinations of chromophobes. In so doing, as Marx famously said, this larger development made human relations come to seem more and more as though they were relations between things. What is so miraculous about the commodity form, however, is that it is precisely this ideological character—this mystical experience of human relations as if they are relations between numbers on a spreadsheet, or machines on a factory floor, or products at a shopping mall, or colors in an ever-expanding, ever-self-differentiating, evermore intersectional spectrum of consumable life-styles and equally consumable death-styles—that has enabled our wonders to surpass those of the pyramids, aqueducts, and cathedrals. Secularizing, industrializing modernity was never the eradication of a transcendent God but instead a matter of piping Him through each and every market channel as a kind of thin gruel or slimy lubricant or heady exhaust. What modernity has achieved even more than its glorious wonders is the capacity to spread its violence around. “Usury lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between worlds,” is how Marx put it.13 This is what he meant by the “fetishism” of commodities generally: we are all sacrificial lambs forfeiting our sovereign corporeality for the sake of the sovereignty of the transcendence and eternal life of money itself. “This mediator,” he said, is a “real God” but we might better think of it as the Holy Spirit or pneuma and think of Marx’s theory as a pneumatology that describes the ways in which human embodiment is, as he put it, “the material in which money exists,” the material form or medium that money brings to a new nature by filling it with a new spirit.14

The Color of Photography: The Covenant of Paul Strand

Put differently, the structural violence or alienation of the commodity form, the process of lumpenization and self-lumpenization, the process of alienation or detribalization, the process of becoming a number on a spreadsheet or an image on the screen, or this or that color of violence, is—beyond its extraordinary death and destruction—a wondrous thing because it is a medium of our second nature, our overcoming of our animality and becoming human. Something like that has always been the promise when we are called upon to imagine ourselves as functionally equal to 10 pounds of tea or 20 yards of linen or “x commodity A, etc.,” as Marx put it, as an abstract exchangeable good on the open marketplace. In its blinkered, ideological, self-isolating form this has been called the “American Dream,” just as in its emancipatory enlightenment form it has historically been named the revolutionary proletariat, just as it was once the promise of being a subject of God.15 In the end, the violence of the commodity form is the violence of transcendence itself, the violence of becoming human. There is no outside to the absolutism of the commodity form, in other words, no outside to being reduced to an image or color or thing, because that violence is inseparable from reason’s capacity for cognition and its moral confrère judgment. There are only the processes of reflection and negation along the way that open up the structural violence of human reason epistemologically, socially, affectively, and aesthetically, thereby allowing it to see beyond itself. There is only our capacity to move through the passive ambivalence of the depressive position and enter into the active interregnum between saying “yes I am” or “no I’m not” equal to 20 yards of linen, between saying “yes I am” or “no I’m not” equal to my “colorful / freedoms that don’t fly.” “Reification,” Adorno said, “is essential to artworks,” and so it is for us.16 The weight of the world holding us down, in other words, is not the socialist relations between things, as Ayn Rand and her fellow travelers had it, but instead the liberal dream of the democracy of things, the dream of things themselves, that neoliberalism writ large has done so much to enshrine. This way of thinking presumes that the doggedly independent thingliness of things is a sign of the long-adulteratedbut-still-indwelling promise of universal autarky, of unalienated, dereified, self-made life, of undefiled, autogenerative poiesis. This is our chromotopia, our rainbow thinking, our righteous intersectionality, our feel-good, market-oriented communitarianism. Freedom, however, is not possible without violence, without accepting that feeling, thought, language, morality—i.e., the engines of freedom itself—are themselves inherently violent, inherently an imposition of my feeling, my thought, my language, my morality. We might call the inevitability of such an imposition human nature, or if we extend it to my need, the poetic project of nature itself. Our only out from the categorical violence of such poetic self-fashioning is not to somehow sidestep violence by simply allowing for the other—as if it were a matter of simple courtesy—but instead to enter into another complementary form of violence—that of the process

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introduced by aisthesis or other-recognition. This is the human project of aesthetic judgment that gives rise to a sense of your feeling, your thought, your language, your morality, your need—regardless of whether the “you” in question is a person, place, or thing—and finds it beautiful or ugly, sublime or common. For our purposes, this latter violence, the violence of judgment, is that of the art appreciator, critic, or interpreter; and the former, the violence of selfhood, is that of the photographer, artist, or image-maker generally. In what follows, Erwin Panofsky will serve in the name of aisthesis as a negation to the romantic poiesis struggled with above, and Paul Strand as our negation of the negation and thus as a figure for a return to an alternative poetics whose foundational modern narcissism, relentless chromophilia, or compulsive identitarian thinking is able to reach beyond itself.

Chromophobia There is a wonderful photograph of Erwin Panofsky, shot in 1967 three or so months before he died, as he was taking in—judging from his body language, with no little appreciation—Rosso Fiorentino’s 1521 Allegory of Salvation with the Virgin and Christ Child, St Elizabeth, the Young St John the Baptist and Two Angels (fig. 4).17 For me, it brings to mind the old joke which says that we art historians are best understood as “Jews teaching Protestants about Catholic art.” In the cast of characters, this makes Panofsky the Jew, the Il Rosso the Catholic art, and those of us being schooled by the bodily comportment of the great champion of “man’s proud and tragic consciousness of selfapproved and self-imposed principles,” the Protestants.18 In other words, while the discipline is no longer what it was back in the early days of philosophically-minded central European art history and its diaspora, its legacy lives on as a condition of possibility for our methods and identifications.19 Indeed, I take this joke to provide us with the rudiments of a materialist account of art history’s social, cultural, and political value. Like any endeavor, art history is at its best when it takes on a leadership role born of concrete need. Leadership of the sort that generally moves history towards greater freedom and equality is always born of loosening a knot, of taking on a problem, of a struggle for freedom (just as it is always about the tightening of a knot when it moves us towards unfreedom and inequality). The obstacle for art history, the unresolved knot or unrealized need upon which it rests, the mark of its truck with the violence of the commodity form, is its Judaism—which by definition means its suffering, and warding off, of anti-Judaism. As our joke already suggests, the place of this identification in the world is not simple. Art history as a discipline, like modern art as a practice, has always been rooted in the left-Hegelian conviction that, as one historian has put it, while “Catholic Christendom had initiated the era of abstract subjectivity, modern Protestantism had

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4: Rosso Fiorentino, Allegory of Salvation with the Virgin and Christ Child, St. Elizabeth, the Young St. John the Baptist and Two Angels, ca. 1521, 161.29 × 119.38 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, © bpk / Scala.

consummated it.”20 Modern art and art history alike were born with the aim of loosening the knot of that abstraction. The historical form that our professional posture has taken is equally that of the Judaization of the Catholic image or icon as it is the Protestantization of the Jewish Bilderverbot or ban on graven images. That is, it is about a sophisticated distance from, or relation to, the image rather than a naive direct or immediate identification.21 As the original nineteenth-century theory had it—long before Max Weber made it the fulcrum for his account of the spirit of our

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age—Protestantism adopted as its lever that part of Judaism that Catholic antisemitism had fostered as both foil and instrument for its own secularization.22 Insofar as “Christians have become Jews” and “the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations,” Marx explained in 1843, “Jews have emancipated themselves.”23 The economic function that we now euphemistically call “financial services”— the pneuma or “real God” of the capitalist enterprise already noted—had long been stigmatized by the Abrahamic traditions. The Hebrew book of Ezekiel, for example, asks rhetorically whether he who “lends at interest, and takes profit” shall live and then answers itself decisively “He shall not live. He has done all these abominations; he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon himself.” The medieval Catholic Church enforced this prohibition in many respects even though it ran afoul of the early stirrings of the capitalist economy. The historic solution to this contradiction was to foist the function and stigma of the abomination of moneylending onto the Jewish minority, something that worked in part because of the brute power of the Christian majority but also because of a biblical loophole which suggested that it was okay for one “people” to profit from lending to another but not to their own. Jews were chosen to be that people and put at the center of the emergent capitalist economy. In so doing they became the historic carriers of “practical spirit” at the dawn of modernity and standard bearers for the new age.24 This development also had the secondary effect of establishing a new crystalline ideal of the separation of spheres that would be the heart and engine of modernity. Marx put it this way: “Judaism attains its apogee with the perfection of civil society; but civil society only reaches perfection in the Christian world. Only under the sway of Christianity, which objectifies all national, natural, moral and theoretical relationships, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state.”25 The “ever-recurring” Jewish diaspora or “community of expulsion”—a community defined by being expelled territorially throughout the bulk of its history but also by being cast out from reputable forms of subsistence—provided emergent capitalism with its model for a separate sphere of life, for civil society or the realm of economic power distinguishable from religious and political right.26 It was Protestantism’s role to make that realm into a workable abstraction sufficiently devoid of ethnic or religious bias in order to simultaneously absorb the Jewish community of expulsion and expel itself from theopolitical regulation in the historic partition of public and private realms. At the urban center of this abstraction are two forms of lumpen subjectivity, two forms of self-abjection or being unto death—a newly private, chromophobic one that

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5: Quentin Massys, The Tax Collectors, late 1520s, oil on panel, 115 × 93 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, © bpk / Gemäldegalerie, SMB / Jörg P. Anders.

Marx called the “aristocracy of finance,” and another constituted by a long list of lower-rent public, chromophilic sorts that he described generally as “the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.” Quentin Massys’s Tax Collectors from the 1520s (fig. 5) and Gustave Courbet’s 1854 painting variously titled The Meeting or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (fig. 6), and, more importantly for our purposes, The Wandering Jew can stand for these two poles both developmentally and socially. The Massys depicts the subsumption of Jewish “practical spirit” into Christian abstraction via the newly rationalized pneuma of finance, while the Courbet depicts Christian self-Judaization as a measure of what the artist himself called the “holy and sacred” ground of the bohemianizing avant-garde’s auto-diaspora or self-generated community of expulsion.27 Capitalist man “leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life,” Marx observed. On the one hand there remains the residual form of “life in the political community,

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6: Gustave Courbet, The Meeting or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, 1854, oil on canvas, 129 × 149 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, © bpk / RMN - Grand Palais / RMN - Grand Palais.

in which he considers himself a communal being;” on the other hand, there was the emergent “life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.” In sum, our twofold way of being in the world splits us according to social function: “the bourgeois, like the Jew,” Marx continued, “remains only sophistically in the sphere of political life, just as the citoyen only sophistically remains a Jew or a bourgeois.”28 Both citizen and Jew-cum-bourgeois, but not at the same time, in other words, we moderns remain primordially confused by being torn in two, a confusion that is crystallized as private desire, both in the chromophobic numbers and usurious greed of the financier, and in the chromophilic images and estranged kitsch-like need for public recognition of the bohemian. The figure of the Jew for the Christian world thus was an agent or intermediary or catalyst of alienation, a figure for the outside that had been subsumed into and had revolutionized the inside, a figure that made possible the division between political and civil society, public and private life, which itself is the source and means of “gelatinous” or structural violence. To put it differently, the Christian subsumption of the Jew’s expulsion was the emblem par excellence of the triumphant conversion of relations between humans into relations between things—the emblem of reification—

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regardless of whether that triumph registered in the commandeering chromophobic correspondences between numbers on a balance sheet or in the desperate chromophilic self-expulsion into the image. Whether as numbers or pictures, such reification is always a form of dehumanization, always a movement from our second nature back to our first, from our humanity back to our animality, from the workable abstraction of chromophobia back to the overwhelming immediacy of chromophilia. In this history as narrated by Adorno and Horkheimer, the biological leap into second nature, made possible by the objectification of oneself and others, was itself the primordial sin or transgression that founded antisemitism. The Jews, they wrote, “are pronounced guilty of what, as the first citizens, they were the first to subdue in themselves: the susceptibility to the lure of base instincts, the urge toward the beast and the earth, the worship of images.”29 As the “first citizens,” or people of the first covenant, Jews stand over all others as the founders of political society, society based on a universal monotheistic law even as the violation of that law is projected back onto them as the antisemite’s founding justification.30 The birth of political society endowed us with our second nature or collective social subjectivity, but it did so at the price of repressing our first animal nature. Antisemitism was born of resentment over that repression, of anger at the internalized parent-like authority that says “no.” Ever since, the split between first and second, animal and human natures, has played out in the contest between civil and political society, between the private realm of person-to-person intercourse in love, power, or money and the public realm of collectively realized rules, rituals, and processes. Today, it seems fair to say, that contest is more virulent than it has been in a long time and the tyranny of the immediate seems evermore to have the upper hand. Writing during the war and before the establishment of the Israeli state, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that reconciliation of this split “is Judaism’s highest concept, and expectation its whole meaning.”31 Such a dream of reconciliation between first and second, animal and human, civil and political, chromophilic and chromophobic natures was also the engine driving Marx’s understanding that “Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen.”32 Enlightenment, humanism, emancipation, self-realization can be achieved, Marx and Adorno tell us, only when capitalism’s subsumption of Jewish practical spirit into Christian abstraction had been fully realized and our two natures and two manners of social life—being animal and being human—are reconciled as one. The figure of the Jew expelled into a lumpen and subaltern social world was, thus, the alien fetish, the catalyst that drove our capitalist modernity, a modernity that— we would be foolish to forget—has distinguished itself by the extraordinary scale of its direct violence and even more by the unprecedented insidiousness or gelatinousness of its structural violence. But as an emblem of reification made possible by its

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framing in Christian abstraction, that figure also served as a revolutionary irritant, a plenipotentiary of non-alienation, of life “no longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity,” and has thus served equally as an emissary of reification’s Aufhebung.33 The Christianization of the premodern ban on images and the Judaization of the modernist image, in short, have served together as a joint figure of enlightenment by marking the contradiction between the extralegality of civil society and the constitutive law of the state. As Marx and Adorno had it, enlightenment is the never fully realized but always reached for promise of reconciling that contradiction in a fully socialized subjectivity—a self that subsumes, reconciles, and meets our immediate animal needs in a fully humanized, fully concretized second nature. Like the first covenant which initially articulated the promise of transcendence in human terms at the price of a kind of phobia or repression, art history’s Judaic reach to turn the immediate experience of things into the protracted and deliberative abstraction of words is itself constitutive of that humanization.

Chromophilia Our common sense about Paul Strand’s mature work offers us two complementary assumptions about his politics, and neither is very attractive. First, we assume that in his later years he became the worst sort of mawkish humanist, drawing not only from the geographically and politically unfettered universalism that those of us who study the history of photography associate with Edward Steichen’s 1955 exhibition The Family of Man, but also from the discredited colonial-era, existentializing, and primitivizing pseudoscientific doctrine of place that the postwar existentialists, structuralists (and most everyone else) had rebelled against. In Mexico, rural New England, the Hebrides, Africa, extra-industrial Italy and France, as his one-time left-leaning collaborator and later HUAC-turncoat Ben Maddow put it, “among the simple folk, he could photograph the heroes of his mind. Strand looked at them as The People; actually, they were small shopkeepers, craftsmen, village peasants, with all the prejudices of the small worlds they inhabited.”34 In this view Strand takes on a Heideggerian cast, looking outward to an external authority—Maddow’s “The People” occupying the old role of God or Nature, Sein or Dasein—whom he validates in his capacity as a documentarian-cum-supplicant. Second, we often assume that rather than merely being mawkish and far from a timorous supplicant Strand was out-and-out doctrinaire in the manner testified to by Ralph Steiner:

The Color of Photography: The Covenant of Paul Strand

“The Strand I got to know was just about the most grimly serious person I’d met in my life. He was a walking Sword of Rectitude. For him there was something called Right and something called Wrong, and especially in photography they were poles apart […] he had no difficulty using that awesome word ‘truth.’ For Strand, truth was an absolute.”35 There is no question that Steiner was right that Strand trucked in the dominion of truth, just as that truth was to be found hovering somewhere in the vicinity of Maddow’s “People,” but his socialism was no more scientific than it was nationalist. He had little of the dream of a perfect overarching structure as evident in Rodchenko’s 1928 call for photographers to “crystallize man,” for example, or Diego Rivera’s 1932 plea for “an art simple, clear, and transparent as crystal, hard as steel, cohesive as concrete.” Against nation and science both, the dogmatic doctrine at the heart of Strand’s Sword of Rectitude was instead the core humanist tenet that insists we humans are both more than an emotionally directed horde of supplicants and more than mere individuals kept in place by our own and others’ hardened calculations. Contrary to our common sense, in other words, Strand was never willing to externalize human reason into a shiny, crystalline, autonomous form, nor was he willing to reduce human being to mere animal existence, to the biological need to survive and thus to our base impulses to herd together for protection and exploit each other for mercenary gain.36 In this respect, Strand would have agreed with Gérard Wajcman’s summary of our circumstance, that “We’ve had a hard time of it, finding our places” after “the disasters of the 20th century” and, as a result, “take no pride in [our] human condition;” instead we “get drunk on animals and communications,” on “the jouissance of the blablabla as it slowly saturates public space” and dissolves the boundaries of the old bourgeois self into the burden-free bliss of mere thingliness.37 Without question he would have joined Wajcman’s damning judgment of our modern apologists for “the fish life,” our post-Enlightenment “scientific ideologues [who] proclaim that man is an animal just like all the others” and whisper “in the politicians’ ears” that salvation “will come in our being animal—body, genes, neurons, and all the rest of it.”38 Think of Edmund Burke decrying our tendency to credit reason with “feelings which merely arise from the mechanical structure of our bodies.”39 Or Nietzsche crying out “There, where the state ends, only there begins the human being who is not superfluous; there begins the song of necessity, the unique and irreplaceable melody.”40 Or George Santayana lamenting that “whilst all the animals trust their senses and live, philosophy would persuade man alone not to trust them and, if he was consistent, to stop living.”41 Or Michel Foucault championing the Cynics’ demand for animality as “a way of being with regard to oneself, a way of being which must take the form of a constant test.”42 Or, for that matter, think of the recent round of such

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human-cum-animal-cum-thing whispering in the work of Jane Bennett or Graham Harman or Quentin Meillassoux. Each reaches for the false innocence of “the song of necessity” and in the process forgoes the autonomy that comes with responsibility— the demand that colorito be both recognized by and responsible for disegno—that is the passion and pulse of Strand’s mature enterprise. For example, Strand would have snorted at the diagnosis, as Wajcman does, that “Man” is “a denatured animal,” that we are “animals sick with language” who “long for a cure,” but more and more we have come to be convinced by those who are fleecing us of our security, opportunity, and power that this is the case.43 Our only cure, so we are told, is the dissolution of our unitary bourgeois subjectivity into the oceanic plenitude of objecthood, the desublimation of our souls into the bare life of things. Like Marx and Adorno, Strand saw this regressivity gurgling up from below and he did what he could to liberate it from its own delusion in the traditional manner. Against the enclosures of practical spirit in the crystalline opportunism of the bureaucracy or spreadsheet, on the one hand, or in the “vital materialism” of things qua things, on the other, he insisted on mediation, on the fluid and transparent interpenetration of first and second nature, practical and human spirit, private and public life. The vehicle of that mediation was, as Kant had originally formulated it, open “reflective” judgment rather than judgment enclosed within the abstraction of concepts, on the one hand, or the immediacy of bodily need, on the other. As Kant put it, “The reflecting power of judgment […] proceeds […] not as it were merely mechanically, like an instrument, but artistically, in accordance with the general but at the same time indeterminate principle of a purposive arrangement of nature in a system.”44 In other words, reflective judgment allows one to experience the world as a process oriented towards reasonable ends—liberty, fraternity, and equality, say, or perhaps more simply, the pursuit of happiness—but does so in a way that specific understanding of that process and those ends is continuously up for negotiation. It is the human orientation towards—or better, because it makes it ontological, the human being towards—that “purposive arrangement of nature in a system” that Strand photographs (fig. 7). The lesson that Strand offers us is really nothing more than that which he passes on from Asante lore in his Ghana book: “When you have no master, someone will catch you and sell you for what you are worth.”45 Beyond the silly or ideological delusion that any of us are our own masters the obvious question this raises is about what constitutes the master we have or the one to whom we might be sold for what we are worth. The chromophobic threat of the covenant’s repression is very real, of course, but the chromophilic fantasy of animality or thingliness that our would-be left political imagination has been awash in for the last 70 years—that is, the fantasy of existing outside of any standing covenant, outside of power, outside of the realm of politics proper, outside the realm of repression and abstraction—blinds us to this question

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7: Paul Strand, Samuel J. K. Essoun, Shama, Ghana, 1963, gelatin silver print, 17.3 × 23.9 cm, © Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive.

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or throws us off of it and into the realm of culture as if it were domination or liberation itself, as if it were barbarism or “heterotopia” itself. The chromography of culture matters in all sorts of ways, of course, but never on its own as our enslavement or emancipation, never as politics. Colorito only has its victory over disegno at the expense of those it presumes to defend. Strand’s grimly serious photography reminds us of this old truth now long unavailable—the truth of the old left rather than the new— just as it reminds us of the risk of being sold for what we are worth that we take on, whether we acknowledge it or not, when we adopt the fantasy of being a thing. So, too, he reminds us of what does matter: “it is only in the state,” as Hegel put it in his Aesthetics, only in the promise of the covenant, only in the realm of power that acknowledges itself as such, only in “man’s proud and tragic consciousness of selfapproved and self-imposed principles,” that “freedom is actual.”46

Notes 1

This paper benefited from the patronage and vetting of several organizers and their respective publics: Bettina Gockel and her symposium “The Colors of Photography” at the University of Zurich, Robin Kelsey and his symposium “Cameras in Turmoil: The Apparatus of Reproduction in Japan and America, 1960–1975” at Harvard University, and the seminar of Rosilie Hernández and Michał Paweł Markowski, “Modernities: Old Problems, New Approaches” at the University of Illinois, Chicago. 2 Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric And Painting in The French Classical Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3–4. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, Volume 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 4, 17. 4 He was, in short, extraordinarily effective as a merchant: “His modus operandi with courtly patrons, moving freely between one ruler and his circle and another, owes at least something to the mercantile or business-orientated mentality of Venice. His extraordinary ability to construct believable identities for his courtly sitters was to some extent dependent on his maintenance of a professional life beyond the given context in which he presently worked, allowing him a measure of creative distance from the cosseted world they inhabited. But this is not, simply, to return Titian to Venice. It was Titian’s lack of final absorption by either of the sociopolitical orders that he served, his decisive degree of independence from both Venice and the courts, that facilitated his special achievement as a portraitist.” Tom Nichols, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 30, 72, 121. 5 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1. 6 This poem was originally published in the Minnesota Review 23 (Fall 1984), 59–60. In an e-mail correspondence with James and Arlene Scully in 2018/2019 the author made aware of an edited version of the poem, simply called “If”. For the updated version, contact James Scully: http://jamesscully.net/. Accessed January 19, 2019. 7 Income inequality is economic genocide because it systematically shortens the lives of the poor. As The New York Times bluntly put it last year, “where income is higher, life spans are

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longer.” Alicia Parlapiano, “Where Income is Higher, Life Spans are Longer,” The New York Times, March 15, 2014: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/15/business/higherincome-longer-lives.html. Accessed January 19, 2019. For one of the most jarring examples of how this plays out, we need look no further than the Ferguson Report, which shows how in St Louis County, the average life expectancy ranges from 91 in the richest and whitest neighborhood to 56 in the poorest, blackest neighborhood. http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2015/dec/05/income-inequality-policy-capitalism. Accessed January 19, 2019. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 20. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 67. “Idealization is an essential part of the manic position and is bound up with another important element of that position, namely denial. Without partial and temporary denial of ­psychic reality the ego cannot bear the disaster by which it feels itself threatened when the depressive position is at its height.” (Melanie Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to ManicDepressive States,” in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 349). “The hunger for objects, so characteristic of mania, indicates that the ego has retained one defence-mechanism of the depressive position: the introjection of good objects. The manic subject denies the different forms of anxiety associated with this introjection (anxiety, that is to say, lest either he should introject bad objects or else destroy his good objects by the process of introjection); his denial relates not merely to the impulses of the id but to his own concern for the object’s safety. Thus we may suppose that the process by which the ego and ego-ideal comes to coincide (as Freud has shown that they do in mania) is as follows. The ego incorporates the object in a cannibalistic way (the ‘feast’, as Freud calls it in his account of mania) but denies that it feels any concern for it. ‘Surely,’ argues the ego, ‘it is not a matter of such great importance if this particular object is destroyed. There are so many others to be incorporated.’ This disparagement of the object’s importance and the contempt for it is, I think, a specific characteristic of mania and enables the ego to effect that partial detachment which we observe side-by side with its hunger for objects. Such detachment, which the ego cannot achieve in the depressive position, represents an advance, a fortifying of the ego in relation to its objects.” (Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of ManicDepressive States,” in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 278–279). Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”: https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm. Accessed January 19, 2019. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch36.htm. Accessed January 19, 2019. “The essence of money is not, in the first place, that property is alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an

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end in itself. […] In credit, the man himself, instead of metal or paper, has become the mediator of exchange, not however as a man, but as the mode of existence of capital and interest. The medium of exchange, therefore, has certainly returned out of its material form and been put back in man, but only because the man himself has been put outside himself and has himself assumed a material form. Within the credit relationship, it is not the case that money is transcended in man, but that man himself is turned into money, or money is incorporated in him. Human individuality, human morality itself, has become both an object of commerce and the material in which money exists. Instead of money, or paper, it is my own personal existence, my flesh and blood, my social virtue and importance, which constitutes the material, corporeal form of the spirit of money. Credit no longer resolves the value of money into money but into human flesh and the human heart.” Karl Marx, “Comments on James Mill”: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/. Accessed January 19, 2019. 15 “The subject which naively postulates absolutes,” Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in 1943, “is sick,” and yet they still insisted without qualification that “the pathology of cognition”—the reduction of human beings to colors or images or things—is “a constitutive element of all judgment, a necessary illusion,” a dream we need to tell ourselves in order to become human. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 160. 16 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (see note 9), 136. 17 See the photograph here: Gerda Panofsky, Addenda et Corrigenda zu: Erwin Panofsky: Korres­ pondenz 1910 bis 1968. Eine kommentierte Auswahl in fünf Bänden, ed. Dieter Wuttke, vol. V: Korrespondenz 1962 bis 1968 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011), 1. 18 Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), 1. 19 See Karen Michels, “Art History, German Jewish Identity and the Emigration of Iconology,” in Catherine Soussloff, ed., Jewish Identity in Modern Art History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 167–179. 20 Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 195. 21 This is the distinction Panofsky makes between the art historian and the “‘naive’ beholder.” Panofsky, “Humanistic Discipline” (see note 18), 16–17. 22 “But all the more emphasis was placed on those parts of the Old Testament which praise formal legality as a sign of conduct pleasing to God. They held the theory that the Mosaic Law had only lost its validity through Christ in so far as it contained ceremonial or purely historical precepts applying only to the Jewish people, but that otherwise it had always been valid as an expression of the natural law, and must hence be retained. This made it possible, on the one hand, to eliminate elements which could not be reconciled with modern life. But still, through its numerous related features, Old Testament morality was able to give a powerful impetus to that spirit of self-righteous and sober legality which was so characteristic of the worldly asceticism of this form of Protestantism. […] The general tendency of the older Judaism toward a naive acceptance of life as such was far removed from the special characteristics of Puritanism. It was, however, just as far—and this ought not to be overlooked— from the economic ethics of mediaeval and modern Judaism, in the traits which determined the positions of both in the development of the capitalistic ethos. The Jews stood on the side of the politically and speculatively oriented adventurous capitalism; their ethos was, in a word, that of pariah-capitalism. But Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization

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of capital and labour. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose.” Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: https://www.marxists.org/ reference/archive/weber/protestant-ethic/ch05.htm. Accessed January 19, 2019. 23 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1844/jewish-question/. Accessed January 19, 2019. 24 “It is easy to date the original moment of European anti-Semitism. It all started not in Ancient Rome but in eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe, which was awakening from the inertia of the ‘Dark Ages’ and experiencing a fast growth in market exchange and the greater prominence of money. At that precise point, ‘the Jew’ emerged as the enemy: the usurper, the parasitic intruder who disturbs the harmonious social edifice. Theologically, this moment is also the moment of what Jacques le Goff called the ‘birth of the Purgatorium,’ the idea that the choice is not only between Heaven and Hell but that there has to be a third, mediating, place, where one can make a deal, pay for one’s sins (if they are not too great) with a determined amount of repentance—money again!” Slavoj Žižek, “Anti-Semitism and its Transformations,” in Gianni Vattimo and Michael Marder, eds., Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 5–6. 25 Marx, “Jewish Question” (see note 23). 26 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 428. 27 Linda Nochlin, “Gustave Courbet’s Meeting: A Portrait of the Artist as a Wandering Jew,” The Art Bulletin 49:3 (September 1967): 216. 28 Marx, “Jewish Question” (see note 23). 29 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (see note 15), 153. 30 Just as they stand for the founding of the public sphere: “The privileged role of Jews in the establishment of the sphere of the ‘public use of reason’ hinges on their subtraction from every state power. Theirs is the position of the ‘part of no-part’ in every organic nationstate community, and it is this position, not the abstract-universal nature of their monotheism, that makes them the immediate embodiment of universality. No wonder, then, that, with the establishment of the Jewish nation-state, a new figure of the Jew emerged: a Jew resisting identification with the State of Israel, refusing to accept the State of Israel as his true home, a Jew who ‘subtracts’ himself from this State, and who includes the State of Israel among the states towards which he insists on maintaining a distance, to live in their interstices. And it is this uncanny Jew who is the object of what one cannot but designate as ‘Zionist anti-Semitism,’ the foreign excess disturbing the community of the nation-state. These Jews, the ‘Jews of the Jews themselves,’ worthy successors of Spinoza, are today the only Jews who continue to insist on the ‘public use of reason,’ refusing to submit their reasoning to the ‘private’ domain of the nation-state.” Žižek, “Anti-Semitism” (see note 24), 6. “If the public sphere is a protestant accomplishment, as several scholars have argued, then public life presupposes and reaffirms a dominant religious tradition as the secular. […] [S]ome religions are not only already ‘inside’ the public sphere, but they help to establish a set of criteria that distinguish the public from the private. This happens when some religions are relegated to the ‘outside’—either as ‘the private’ or as the threat to the public as such—while others function to support and delimit the public sphere itself. […] It makes a different kind of sense to refer to a secular Jew than to a secular Catholic; whereas both may be presumed to have departed from religious belief, there may be other forms of belonging that do not presume or require belief; secularization may well be one way that Jewish life continues as Jewish.” Judith Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism? Or, Arendt and the Critique of the

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Nation-State,” in Gianni Vattimo and Michael Marder, eds., Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 24. 31 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (see note 15), 165. 32 Marx, “Jewish Question” (see note 23). And Hegel before him, whose “efforts to discover a philosophical reconciliation between the humanist ideals of the development of personality and the objective, immutable facts of society leads him to an increasingly profound understanding, firstly of the problems of private property and later of labour as the fundamental mode of interaction between individual and society.” Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics (London: Merlin Press, 1975), 9. 33 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (see note 9), 310. Michael Löwy sums up this pas de deux by considering it through romanticism’s twin urges to revolution and nation: “The romantic protest, running through modern culture from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s day to our own is directed at the cold, calculating, utilitarian, spirit of the modern and capitalistic age […] this romantic trend usually took on a conservative and restorative character—the main exception being Jewish intellectuals, who often demonstrated marked socialist, utopian or revolutionary tendencies.” He explains that the Jewish people were understood to be “particularly qualified for the task of helping to build socialist communities, precisely because [they were] less addicted to the cult of the state.” Indeed, according to Paul Breines’s account of the thought of Gustav Landauer, “the Diaspora became the social base so to speak of the idea of the Jews as redeemers of humanity [and in so doing paradoxically] freed the Jews; it allowed them to remain a nation, and at the same time, to transcend that nation and all nations, and to perceive the future unity of mankind as being made up of a variety of true nations.” See Michael Löwy, “Romantic Prophets of Utopia: Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber,” in Paul Mendes-Flohr and Anya Mali in collaboration with Hanna Delf von Wolzogen, eds., Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 64, 75; and Paul Breines, “The Jew as Revolutionary: The Case of Gustav Landauer,” The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 12, no. 1 (1967): 82. 34 Ben Maddow, “A View from Below: Paul Strand’s Monumental Presence,” American Art 5, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 65. 35 Quoted in ibid., 48. 36 Nor was he willing to accept that default position that Hegel said “lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing,” and thus becomes “an unhappy socalled ‘beautiful soul’.” G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 399–400. 37 Gérard Wajcman, “The Animals that Treat Us Badly,” lacanian ink 33 (Spring 2009): 130. “The right to hiddenness is a barrier: it constitutes the frontier of intimacy. […] intimacy is nowadays published, displayed on screens and exhibited on museum walls. I would like to add: shamelessly. We have entered a time of unveiling, which is also a shame free time.” Gérard Wajcman, “Exposed Intimacy, Extorted Intimacy,” The Symptom 13 (Summer 2012): http:// www.lacan.com/symptom13/?p=66. Accessed January 19, 2019. 38 Wajcman, “Animals” (see note 37), 130–132. 39 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 41. 40 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 36. 41 George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 297.

The Color of Photography: The Covenant of Paul Strand

42 Michel Foucault, The Courage of the Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 265. 43 Wajcman, “Animals” (see note 37), 131. 44 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17. 45 See Paul Strand with Basil Davidson, Ghana: An African Portrait (New York: Aperture, 1976), 64. 46 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 99. Giorgio Agamben casts the question of not seeing what matters as so: “Today we behold the overwhelming preponderance of the government and the economy over anything you could call popular sovereignty—an expression by now drained of all meaning. Western democracies are perhaps paying the price for a philosophical heritage they haven’t bothered to take a close look at in a long time. To think of government as simple executive power is a mistake and one of the most consequential errors ever made in the history of Western politics. It explains why modern political thought wanders off into empty abstractions like law, the general will, and popular sovereignty [or, for our more general purposes, wandering off into the domain of culture] while entirely failing to address the central question of government and its articulation, as Rousseau would say, to the sovereign or locus of sovereignty. In a recent book I tried to show that the central mystery of politics is not sovereignty but government; not God but his angels; not the king but his minister; not the law but the police—or rather, the double governmental machine they form and propel.” Giorgio Agamben, “Introductory Note,” in Agamben et al., eds., Democracy in What State? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 3–4.

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The Mount Fuji of Davos Part of the Series “Matographs and Volcanoes” 1996–2018

Affiche for the exhibition “Hans Danuser – The Mount Fuji of Davos,” 25. 11. 2018–28. 04. 2019, above the entrance of the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Museum Davos. Blow up (280 × 960 cm) of the image (I 5) in the cycle “Mount Pavlof – Explosive Volcano Eruption,” 9 parts (I 1—I 9), each 20.5 × 20 cm, from the series “Matographs and Volcanoes,” 1996–2018, and part of the “One Million Pound Project,” 1993–2018. Photo: Atelier Danuser / H. D. Casal.

Affiche for the exhibition “Hans Danuser – The Mount Fuji of Davos,” 25. 11. 2018–28. 04. 2019, above the entrance of the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Museum Davos during snowfall. Blow up (280 × 960 cm) of the image (I 5) in the cycle “Mount Pavlof – Explosive Volcano Eruption,” 9 parts (I 1—I 9), each 20.5 × 20 cm, from the series “Matographs and Volcanoes,” 1996–2018 and part of the “One Million Pound Project,” 1993–2018. Photo: Atelier Danuser / H. D. Casal.

Affiche for the exhibition “Hans Danuser – The Mount Fuji of Davos,” 25. 11. 2018–28. 04. 2019, above the entrance of the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Museum Davos during snowfall. Blow up (280 × 960 cm) of the image (I 5) in the cycle “Mount Pavlof – Explosive Volcano Eruption,” 9 parts (I 1—I 9), each 20.5 × 20 cm, from the series “Matographs and Volcanoes,” 1996–2018 and part of the “One Million Pound Project,” 1993–2018. Photo: Atelier Danuser / H.D. Casal.

Hans Danuser Mount Fuji 14 parts (I, II 1–II 3, III, IV, V 1–V 3, VI, VII 1–VII 3, VIII) Matographs, each 20.5 × 20 cm From the series “Matographs and Volcanoes,” 1996–2018 and part of the “One Million Pound Project,” 1993–2018 / / Part of the exhibition “Hans Danuser – The Mount Fuji of Davos” at Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Museum Davos, 25. 11. 2018–28. 04. 2019

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Installation view, Matographs from the series “Matographs and Volcanoes,” 1996–2018 by Hans Danuser in Hall 2 of the exhibition “Hans Danuser – The Mount Fuji of Davos” at Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Museum Davos, 25. 11. 2018–28. 04. 2019. Photo: Atelier Danuser / H.D. Casal.

Installation view, Hall 4 of the exhibition “Hans Danuser – The Mount Fuji of Davos” at Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Museum Davos, 25. 11. 2018–28. 04. 2019. Photo: Atelier Danuser / H. D. Casal. Hans Danusers Matographs from the series “Matographs and Volcanoes,” 1996–2018 (r.) in dialogue with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Tinzenhorn – Mountain Gorge Zügen near Monstein, 1919–20, oil on canvas (l.).

Hans Danuser Mount Tambora – Explosive Volcano Eruption, June 1815 10 parts (I 1–I 10) Matographs, each 20.5 × 20 cm From the series “Matographs and Volcanoes,” 1996–2018 and part of the “One Million Pound Project,” 1993–2018 / / Part of the exhibition “Hans Danuser – The Mount Fuji of Davos” at Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Museum Davos, 25. 11. 2018–28. 04. 2019

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Installation view, Hall 5 of the exhibition “Hans Danuser – The Mount Fuji of Davos” at Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Museum Davos, 25. 11. 2018–28. 04. 2019. Photo: Atelier Danuser / H. D. Casal. f.l.t.r.: 1: Hans Danuser, View of the Eggberg from Oberschthof, 2017, digital photograph, pigment print on paper 190 g/m2. 2: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Alpine Hut in the Sunset, 1920, etching. 3: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mountain Gorge Zügen with Tinzenhorn, 1920, black chalk,washed. 4: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, View of Clavadel Mountain from Frauenkirch, 1933, woodcut.

Hans Danuser View of the Eggberg from Obersthof, 2017 Digital photograph, pigment print on paper 190 g/m2, 110 × 106 cm From the series “Matographs and Volcanoes,” 1996–2018 // Part of the exhibition “Hans Danuser – The Mount Fuji of Davos” at Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Museum Davos, 25. 11. 2018–28. 04. 2019

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Bettina Gockel

Uncalibrated: From the Standpoint of Color—Hans Danuser

Against Photography, Against Pictures, Against Interpretation Photography does not necessarily and simply depict outer reality—this seems to be a commonplace by now. However, the topos of photography as a depiction and as ­evidence of reality still stands firm, even in times of fake news. Theoreticians of photography have battled against such simplifications of photography’s functions and possibilities. They have emphasized that even if photography always has a referent in reality, it is by no means to be understood as a simple depiction or mirror of that reality.1 In fact, the referential relationship between the medium and reality is in itself abstract. And this provides space and time to reflect on the connection between an image and the “real” world in a critical way. Modern photographers who have wanted their works to be seen as “art” (and who wanted to see themselves as “artists”) have experimented with photography to the point of abstraction in order to underline photography’s creative potential, rather than drawing upon theoretical and critical positions. They employed the photogram, in particular, to reclaim what they took to be the supreme guiding ideas of modern art—coincidence, subjectivity, autonomy. Ultimately and paradoxically, however, these experiments only played into the hands of the topos of photography as the medium par excellence of “what you see is what you get.” For what was exposed were things, objects. The result is an image that shows the object and provides evidence of its existence during the process of becoming an image.2 None of these viewpoints—photography as a depiction of reality, photography as a theoretically charged image, photography as carrier of reference (and as such as a text), or photography as abstraction—have shaken the pictoriality of photography. Why should they? After all, photography is expected to assert itself as an image—and in the best case, from an artistic point of view, as a work of art. But it is exactly this tradition and history of photography as image that Hans Danuser does not draw upon. To say this does not render obsolete art-historical attempts to classify him as a great

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romantic of landscape art, or as a representative of abstract or abstracting photography. Danuser certainly invites such interpretations.3 Yet he essentially falls outside the traditional history of the modern image, be it technical or artistic. If nothing else, due to his use of color. But more on that later. Or at least by way of anticipation: Danuser evades, to a very large extent, in any case, the definition of color as a visual medium. We connote “color” as a variety of hues. For Danuser, color is black and white with shades of gray, without excluding the colorful. Yet without the polarization of black-and-white vs. color, only one thing remains: to understand and grasp the colors of photography in new material and aesthetic ways. This is more a matter of knowing about colors and their haptics. What do we perceive when we see something in color? What can or should we know and understand about color and photography? Danuser’s series Matographs, which starts from his photograph of a triangle drawn into the ground into shale sand, comprises a number of serially arranged images. These in turn are assigned to the cycles Matographs and Volcanoes (1996–2018) and The One-Million-Pound-Project (1993–2018). Each of the images, measuring 20.5 × 24 cm, has been produced from an original negative using a process he developed in cooperation with the university ETH Zurich, Novartis, and others.4 “Matography” is a neologism of the artist that Gerd Folkers understands to mean a “pseudo-meta-analytical breakdown of chro-matography or cine-matography.” The title “The One-MillionPound-Project” came about during Danuser’s correspondence with the company Ilford, which considered his idea of permeating baryta board with colors to be absurd and unaffordable.5 Standing before the originals, which are differentiated variants because they show several colored interventions (specifically, lines, dashes, and points), what one mainly recognizes is a relief-like, gray-black layer at once matte and shiny, as if the viewer were confronted with the materiality from which the image actually originates. The isosceles triangle appears like a deep furrow within this almost tangible matter, and it does in fact go back to a performative act of carving this shape as a delta into the earth. (In 1991, Danuser undertook an artistic/scientific expedition that he called “Mark-Making in the Shale Sand,” during which the “delta” was drawn into the shale sand by a mathematician from the University of Zurich.) Yet this action is not shown by or depicted in the images, which instead convey the impression that the carving has taken place deep within the photographic material itself. This moves or transfers the supposed depiction into the very process, into the process of photographic development, where it refers not to an interpretive sign but first to the basic material “reality” of this photographic image before the creation of the image. The sophistication of this conceptual work consists both in addressing the topoi of the history of photography (photography as a depiction, an image; we have the negative) and, upon closer examination and through the reflection it triggers, in rejecting such conventional assumptions.

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It is in this sense that this collection of images, these variations of photographic objects, must be understood as works of art against photography. Or to put it another way: Danuser leads us back to the actual material and chemical point of departure for photography. This is analogous to what Susan Sontag once called for, in her essay “Against Interpretation” and in interviews—not to create, through interpretations, yet more myths, as duplicates of reality; but rather to speak and write about “how it is what it is, even that it is what it is” (in Danuser’s sense: to get to the medium).6 However abstract Danuser’s “volcanoes” seem, they speak to reality precisely because they erode the myth of photography. This observation leads to a continuity in Danuser’s work. It is not the first time that he operates with decay, earth, stone, and so on to allow the materiality of photography to speak, rather than furthering photography’s myths. Urs Stahel has accordingly spoken here of the “true color” that is how we must understand Danuser’s “gray,” which Danuser himself calls “bright-dark.”7 Danuser sees the bright-dark reliefs in his volcano series as the sum of all colors, while the lines and points in white, red, blue, green, orange, violet, and reddish-brown are, so to speak, extracted from this sum or emerge from it through the chemical incorporation of these colors into the photographic development process. Danuser succinctly described the project as follows: “Commercially available photographic papers have a white film base. My project involves processing the film base with COLOR according to my ideas, before it is coated with a photographic black-and-white EMULSION” [emphasis in the original] (fig. 1).8

1: Hans Danuser, Project design “Matography – The-One-Million-Pound-Project,” courtesy of the artist.

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By superimposing painting (color) and photography (bright-dark), Danuser breaks free from the traditional characteristics of these media and almost casually allows himself to rewrite (or subvert) color theory as formulated by Newton, which defines white as the sum of all colors, for his own ends. The aim of this “reinvention” is clear: namely, to emphasize the artist’s inventio. Danuser does this in his work through innovative and experimental uses of photography in order to dynamically engage with the system of the arts, but not simply to elevate photography to the level of art, at least not in a traditional way.9 At the same time, all of Danuser’s photographic works decisively break with the obligation of photography as evidence. In this respect, his current preoccupation, with volcanic eruption on a metaphorical level also has the meaning of an “eruption” as a bursting free from so many media conventions and their history/ies. The singular colorfulness that Danuser allows to burst forth, as it were, from his “gray” can also be understood as an eruption of its own kind—because his photographic gray is what he wants to comprehend and treat in a material way. It is one of the usual, even necessary, workshop secrets in the history of art and photography that, despite the involvement of a natural scientist who wrote a text for the first exhibition of the “Volcano” variants, it remains unclear what exactly the material pigments were for Danuser’s project.10 The text only hints at an explanation in noting that the inks may have been as sophisticated as those used to produce bank­ notes. Mystery and fascination, too, are found within this amalgam of art, photography, and natural science. This is the point of Danuser’s reinvention: it eludes interpretation like the concealed sense of fairytale; it simultaneously claims concreteness and precision while seeking to remain inexplicable to science. This is indeed a very broad frame of reference, one that could also suddenly flip, becoming a kind of implosion of the artistic concept. Sometimes less is more. But we know that failure can also lead to artistic significance. And hence before we even postulate such a failure, it is worth examining, from an art-historical perspective, the possibilities of concretion expounded by the artist. We can retrace the following points: –

The Volcano and the Colors of Photography: From the Eighteenth Century to Pictorialism – Hokusai’s Images of Mount Fuji – Remapping—Delocalization, Globalization, and Artistic Humor with Danuser and Hokusai – The Work and the Artist—Autobiography as Inscription in the Oeuvre and the Role of “Davos” as a Place

Uncalibrated: From the Standpoint of Color—Hans Danuser

The Volcano and the Colors of Photography— From the Eighteenth Century to Pictorialism In the eighteenth century, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes marked the transition from a society characterized by faith in God to the dictates of reason.11 At the same time, volcanic eruptions became a metaphor for natural-philosophic theories of the origin of the earth that were intended to supplant religious creation myths. The word “vulcanism” prompted imaginations of an eruptive creation of the earth in the place of old attachments to the story of divine creation.12 It is striking how many artists around 1800 addressed geological phenomena by thematizing theories of the earth’s formation and meteorological phenomena and by observing nature. These artists recognized that, they, too could occupy or even replace “creation”—that just as scientists did so with empirical knowledge and experimental creations, they could do so with images. It became possible for fundamental natural phenomena—the building blocks of creation, as it were, such as earth, water, and air—to be independent subjects of paintings and watercolors (Carl Gustav Carus, John Constable, and William Turner can be mentioned here). At the time, it was already common for the empirical observation and examination of nature by means of the eyes, hands, and optical instruments to be represented by figures in paintings, as we find, for instance, in plate 108 of Jean Hoüel’s ambitious scientific travelogue of Sicily (fig. 2). It may be a coincidence, but the documentation of Danuser’s expedition “Mark-Making in the Shale Sand” shows exactly the typical postures and ways of seeing of those staffage figures (figs. 3, 4). What an opportunity this was (and is) for artists not to subsume their own knowledge to a prescribed myth but instead to be the creators themselves of new knowledge about nature. This was a modern definition of creativity, freed from the shackles of tradition, which has continued to play a role in contemporary art to this day. It is not a matter of artists’ creative knowledge easily fitting into the dispositive of the natural sciences, or of creating an alternative to this paradigm. Rather, what is at stake is the creation of an artistic/scientific “metadispositive” that in turn unleashes new spaces and actions for creativity. The colorful accents in Danuser’s collection of volcano images, to pick out just a few examples, appear as medium-blue layers of lines that mark the peak of the triangle/mountain/volcano (Mount Kilimanjaro, IV 3).13 Or we find rust-red dots that fill, as it were, the given form, which could also be read as a child’s dress. But of course the association should be with glowing clumps of lava, should it not? A rain of fire. As the rather small-format works progress, the colorful additions get in the way of the titles because they raise expectations that move toward more precise forms of recognition. When I see Fujiyama, VIII, I wonder: should the dots not enable some sort of characterization that gives credence to this designation? The delocalized triangles in fact make a mockery of the title. The colors do, too, such that the entire project can also be

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2: Jean Hoüel, Vue du 1er écueil des Ciclopes, plate 108 in “Voyage pittoresque des isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari,” vol. 2, 1782–1787, courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.

understood as ironicizing any kind of certainty that might be attributed to photographs, in the very moment that a title appears to make manifest the supposed content of the picture. What is manifest is merely an appearance, a fallacy, whereas the ­photograph is no deception because it is material. The title is an “interpretation” in Susan Sontag’s sense, which creates the myth of the picture as proof. And Danuser’s image is no picture at all but a material before the picture or in the process of becoming a picture. The same applies to the color as a physical substance, the pigment. It is located between the layers, which in turn lie on the paper. These layers are not just conserved on the paper; they also combine with the layer of silver gelatin.14 And the physical pigment destabilizes the connection between the baryta paper and the ­silver gelatin through the chemical process. Colors in this experiment become a factor creatively disrupting the traditional meanings, functions, and categories of photography: here, elegant black-and-white photography; there, photography as a mass commodity. This gives color, as material painted on between these layers, a completely different status than it has in the history of color photography. In this history, color was either a colorization, for instance as gouache on the surface of the print; or it was the result of potato starch granules in the autochrome process, i.e., an inherent colorfulness; or it was the result of a triple coating (Kodak in the 1930s).

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3: Expedition “Mark-Making in the Shale Sand” with the mathematicians Prof. A. W. Barbour and Prof. B. Dörfler of the University of Zurich in Machänzerrüfe/ Scaläratobel, 1991.

4: Hans Danuser working on the documentation of his expedition “Mark-Making in the Shale Sand” in Machänzerrüfe/Scaläratobel, 1991. Video stills from the television reportage Hans Danuser realisiert eine grössere Kunst in Architektur Arbeit an der Universität Zürich (Hans Danuser Realises a Greater Art-in-Architectural Work at the University of Zurich), 10 vor 10, Schweizer Fernsehen SF, 1991, courtesy of the artist.

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Danuser’s “photo” is basically thus more like an architecture in which the color is drawn into its elements/layers, like rebar structure embedded in concrete. Yet color as the destabilization of the image does not lead to an optical dissolution. Color, in other words, retains an autonomy as a material that counteracts both the critique of color in photography—the charge that it’s nothing more than superficial make-up— and the history of artistic color photography since the 1960s, which paradigmatically positioned itself in opposition to black-and-white photography (Eggleston). In this respect, Danuser opens up a third position that leads out of the dichotomy between traditional black-and-white photography, on the one hand, and color photography, on the other. Danuser buries color within the gray of photography; it, the color, is very deeply rooted there and then erupts like a volcano. It, the color, is thus no painted face but rather an inherent component… of what? Indeed: of the “reinvention of photography.” This is the basso continuo of Danuser’s oeuvre. Hans Danuser sought to understand the grayscales of black-and-white photography as colors long before he began the series in the 1990s and started to deal more intensively with color in relation to photography. An equivalent approach, or understanding, can be found in art-historical studies on coloring, in that a number of authors have endeavored to speak of “achromatic color,” although this concept has not become fully established, which is also true of the scholarly or scientific terms used in studies on color. It is interesting to note, however, that this approach—of not postulating any ­strident opposition between black-and-white and color—was still pursued by the early artistic photographers known as pictorialists. Danuser aligns himself with the experiments and positions of this artistic movement from around the year 1900 in rejecting the de facto birth myth of modern photography—the idea that black and white is modern, and color, a fraud. It is not the similarity of Danuser’s work with those of the pictorialists that is germane here, but rather his strategic and structural decision of how to define photography—namely, from the standpoint of color. It is in fact a consequence of the digital “revolution” that pictorialism—with its color and material experiments, its global orientation, and the connection it entails between photography and avant-garde art—has suddenly become the focus of such completely unexpected attention, in research as well as photography as a popular practice. One might even call Danuser’s technique pseudo-pictorialistic, inasmuch as he introduces color into a black-and-white photographic process. In this regard, his practice fulfills the criteria of “manipulated” photography in that it utilizes means other than light and chemicals. A typical “manipulated” pictorialistic technique is the gum bichromate process, for which light-sensitive salts are dyed with watercolor pigments and gum arabic binder is then selectively applied to the printing paper. The hand of the artist can then subjectively shape the photograph, as in painting.

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5: Gertrude Käsebier, [Alfred Stieglitz], 1901–1902, gum bichromate print, 28.9 × 23.5 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Alfred Stieglitz, the American promoter of pictorialism, would eventually call this type of photography “pictorial photography” (figs. 5, 6).15 It was precisely through the older technique of gum bichromate (which was patented in 1858, experienced a hype in Europe and North America around 1900, and continued to be cultivated by amateur clubs after World War I) that Stieglitz wanted to expand the creative possibilities of photography in order to establish it as an artform. The magazine Camera Work (1903–1917) was famously the international platform for this strategic enterprise.16 Even as Stieglitz made a stringent rhetorical and strategic shift to “straight photogra-

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phy” starting in about 1910, he remained devoted to pictorial effects in his own work. Like Stieglitz, Danuser falls back onto an old aesthetic and technical connection between photography and painting—with the same basic impetus: to (re)invent photography as art. The emblematic reduction of forms and these abstracting compositions oriented the more avant-garde pictorialists towards Japonism in the form popular around 1900, for instance, as taught by Arthur Wesley Dow at the Pratt Institute. The fact that Danuser is also conceptually and associatively oriented toward Japan connects him all the more to the pioneers of fine art photography. Nevertheless, Danuser is not continuing this rhetoric and aesthetic “battle” about art and photography, but is rather staking out a position of his own. He directly addresses the ur-problem of photography as art, thereby distancing himself, through his approach of superimposing and commingling bright-dark/gray, color, and photography, from the dogmatic assertions of the pictorialists (that photography must always be tonal, picturesque, sublime, romantic—like painting) and those of straight photography (that it may only be direct, black and white, clean and pure). The material of photography, as Danuser says, is always both; and this is the case precisely when photography is not thought of as, or expected to be, a medium of depiction. When this happens, everything can be color—and everything can be creative and, in this sense, also full of new insights. Insight is not documented in photography—it is rendered. This surely provokes objections from any number of people even today. But at least since the time of the Renaissance, the fine arts have claimed the potential to generate insight in order to free themselves from being defined primarily as craftsmanship. Danuser is walking the fine line between art and insight in the sense of the legitimizing creativity of photography as art. This isn’t possible without references to the ­history of the arts, even if Danuser also always addresses the natural sciences. It is thus striking and revealing that Danuser’s collection of pictures contains a clear reference to the painting and book projects of the Japanese artist and ukiyo-e painter Katsushika Hokusai. We thus now turn to Hokusai’s three-volume woodblock print series One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, published in 1834, 1835, and 1849, and the series of polychromatic woodcuts Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1830–1836), to help understand how and why Danuser refers to this 3,766-meter mountain in Yamanashi Prefecture, which has become the symbol par excellence of Japan.

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6: Edward Steichen, The Flatiron, 1904, gum bichromate over platinum print, 47.8 × 38.4 cm, © bpk / The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Edward Steichen; © The Estate Edward Steichen / 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich.

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Hokusai’s Images of Mount Fuji It is difficult to overestimate the significance that landscape painting has in Switzerland and Japan. In both countries, it encompasses touristic views and spectacular pictorial presentations of mountains and water (as lakes or the sea). Hodler in Switzerland and Hokusai in Japan were two figures who developed this focus on landscape to a level of originality and modernity. Moreover, drawing on Japanese art as a point of reference makes it possible to place Danuser in a series with the artists of the European avant-garde from van Gogh to Cézanne who were inspired by Japonism. Their focus on landscape, and especially the attention paid to the Mont Sainte-Victoire (fig. 7) and the numerous variations of this massif as a Bildformel in a variety of media, brings us even more insistently to Cézanne. In Japan, Mount Fuji is a holy place, a national icon and a being who has predominately been viewed as male, while sometimes also having female connotations.17 ­Fuji-san is a geological object that, when addressed as a subject, receives its aura in part because it/he/she seldom shows itself and tends to remain cloaked or mysterious, because it withdraws from our view, hiding in weather conditions of fog, rain, or the backlighting of the sun. It/he/she, the mountain, is there even when it isn’t—in fifteen prefectures where its symmetrical form can be seen. Fuji’s trait of eluding an observer’s searching gaze completely contradicts the Western expectation that something should reveal itself, clearly show itself. Western ideas of art, too, carry a greater expectation that art should make something visible, as Paul Klee famously noted: “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”18 Is Danuser’s cooptation of Fuji thus a virtually “blasphemous” appropriation of a celebrity without any understanding of the cultural specificity of Japan? At first glance, perhaps, and I can quite easily imagine that Japanese viewers would be irritated by this appropriation. But not if we look again, from the perspective of the theories of photography and art. For isn’t the withdrawal from the world of making-visible—the artistic topos par excellence—a viable bridge between Danuser’s artistic concept and this symbol of Japan? It is worth remembering that photography has been struggling with the pressure of providing proof of what is visible, of what can be documented as visible, since its beginnings as a visual medium. And furthermore, that the early reference to Romantic and Symbolist painting was no real countermeasure to this media-specific definition of “photography” as an industrial product. And finally, that the photographic abstraction, the photogram, also provided no solution to the dilemma of photography being calibrated for showing and recording. With all of this in mind, the change of scene to “withdrawing oneself” could be understood as subtly enabling photography as art without losing photography for the arts as a material object, as a technique, as a scientific instrument (a function of photography that remains indispensable today). On this photo- and art-theoretical level, the aspect of withdrawal/withdrawing of/in

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7: Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902–1906, oil on canvas, 64.8 × 81.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Helen Tyson Madeira, 1977-288-1.

Danuser’s works makes sense and is comparable to the phenomenon of the numerous ways in which Fuji-san withdraws from clear sight. In addition, in his series “View of the Eggberg from Obersthof, I1 to I5” Danuser plays explicitly with the poetic, colorful hiding or disappearing of the mountain in foggy weather up to the point that in the fourth picture of the series the mountain vanishes completely (fig. 8). In One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai not only presented the Japanese ideal of veiling (for example, as wrapping, as a gift), distance, ephemerality; he intensified these themes by directly implementing the obvious structural elements of such a sequence of images—chronology and seasons—into the whole, even if in an exemplary or random way. Effectively, however, he expanded the frame of reference for Mount Fuji as it has been visualized for centuries, stretching it so far that it becomes impossible to decipher the entire collection of images according to the Western manner of analysis. This isn’t to say that there have been no iconographic analyses or semiotic and poetic approaches to Hokusai’s diverse pictorial creations of Mount Fuji,19 and particularly of the One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji.20 But what dominates in these interpretations is Hokusai’s play with nonreferentiality as ultimately expressing the artist-as-subject and the genius of his inventio—albeit as if hidden, veiled behind a hodgepodge of images and their combinatorics.

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8.1–8.5: Hans Danuser, View of the Eggberg from Obersthof, 2018, 5 parts (I 1–I 5), digital photographs, pigment prints on paper 190 g/m2, 110 × 106 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Hokusai founded his successful enterprise on a sort of double helix of poetry and history of motifs that, as Wolfgang Kemp has shown, is deeply rooted in Japanese ­tradition. Danuser does not connect to this tradition; he reduces the triangle “mountain” to such a degree that it creates a global symbol. At least that is his artistic ambition—to achieve the eternal value of art. Yet there is one thing here that Hokusai and Danuser still have in common: they project their masculine, patriarchally secured artistic selves, or more precisely their artist egos, into the mountain’s hierarchical structure—in the hope of an eternal afterlife. They’ve earned it. Why? Because Hokusai was reacting to the famines and crises of his time by satisfying longings, for instance for a bountiful rice harvest. And because Danuser postulates a global symbolic system of art in an era of digitization and globalization by focusing on what is material, on what is playful, on his very own “idea.” As artists, neither of them withdrew from the factual world to operate on a purely aesthetic level. They took and take positions. This is why these artists create a global history of art that matters to us. And that’s why it really is art that is at stake here. Aside from the scientific points of reference that are important to Danuser across all of his works, with his “Volcano” series he either intentionally or unintentionally

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references a current tourist attraction. Supposedly primeval landscapes such as deserts, and especially volcanic landscapes, such as those in Iceland and Peru, are currently “in” with global elites, who have moved on from previously “hip” locations, such as Portofino or Malaga.21 These people want to go to the edges of civilization, where they can look right out a hotel window to see a volcano towering up, or a glacier

9: Oberholz Mountain Hut / Peter Pichler Architecture + Pavol Micolajcak Architekten, © OskarDaRiz.

lying at their feet. What they are interested in is not so much an up-close experience of landscape or nature, but visual impressions that can be combined with the delicate experiences of bathing and eating to replace the direct experience of nature. The maximum degree of visuality—not as the basis for this experience but as its actual goal—is what is astounding, as is its explanation for the significance of photography. The basic forms of such high-alpine and other similar landscapes and of their geological formations have been finding their way into the avant-garde architecture built as part of a global trend toward wellness and spirituality. We see this, for instance, in the architecture of the Oberholz alpine hut in Obereggen, Italy: skillfully staged in a photograph by Oskar Da Riz, the building’s structural elements are reduced to triangles and rectangles and appear to be extracts from the inhospitable, raw, monumental mountain landscape of the Dolomites (fig.  9).22 This architecture is similar to the delta-shaped inscriptions in the sand that underlie Danuser’s pictures—a reduction to forms and images that enables a perception relieved of the everyday and of conventions. Anyone who experiences the reality of the Dolomites or Davos, in winter or summer, will be unable to take in this purist/primal impression because these forms—reduced to the max—are nullified by the bustle of tourists. Only such images bear witness to the dialogue between monumental nature and intellectual art—just

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please, without people. And this is where Danuser differs considerably from Hokusai’s woodcuts of Mount Fuji, which to a large extent take the human being or clusters of people as a point of reference: the perception of the volcano from the subjectively human visual and social perspective (Hokusai) as opposed to the perception of the mountain from a mathematical and scientific perspective (Danuser). One as a differentiation of the icon and the ideogram, the other as a local and global artistic idea. One as national symbol to this day, the other as modern art that primarily, and ultimately, seeks legitimacy in a museum. In this respect it is also logical, and ironic, that Hokusai’s collections of pictures continue to circulate globally on the art and book market, while Danuser’s volcano photographs, as global as they are, must make their way more or less laboriously through the art system and thus through the institution of the museum.

10: Hans Danuser, View of the Schiahorn from the Window of the Studio in Davos, 1996, digital photograph, casual print, 9 × 9.5 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Remapping: Delocalization, Globalization, and Artistic Humor with Danuser and Hokusai In purely factual terms, the designation “The Mount Fuji of Davos” is presumptuous in a number of ways. For Danuser refers here to three mountains in the Swiss Alps that he stages, in their striking form, in digital photographs: the View of the Schiahorn from the Window of the Studio in Davos (taken during a stay in Davos, fig. 10), the Sulzfluh— View of a Scree Cone from Lake Partnun (the Sulzfluh is 2,817 m high, fig. 11), and the View

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11: Hans Danuser, Sulzfluh – View of a Scree Cone from Lake Partnun, 2018, digital photograph, pigment print on paper 190 g/m2, 110 × 106 cm, courtesy of the artist.

of the Eggberg from Obersthof (2017, reproduced as the opening gesture of this essay). It is not the Sulzfluh, however (one of the ten tallest Alpine peaks in the Rätikon range between Grisons and Vorarlberg) that bears any resemblance whatsoever to Mount Fuji. Rather, it is the cone-shaped pile of scree at the foot of the mountain, formed by the flows of water and movements of the earth and presenting itself, in Danuser’s photograph, in the symmetrical shape of the Japanese volcano. Another reason for Danuser’s fascination with the Sulzfluh is possibly an aesthetic geological phenomenon, namely, the occurrence of the light-to-dark-gray mica slate whose surface has

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12: Katsushika Hokusai, Fuji Seen from the Dyers’ Quarter (Kon’ya-chō no Fuji): Detatched Page from One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku hyakkei) Vol. 2, 1835, woodblock-printed book page, ink on paper, paper: 22.8 × 14.9 cm, Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of the Friends of Arthur B. Duel, Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

an appearance reminiscent of his “volcano” triangle and contains certain salts and quartzes. The Eggberg is 2,186  meters high and certainly not one of Switzerland’s internationally renowned peaks. The Schiahorn and the Sulzfluh lack any far-reaching mythologization of national importance, even though we will surely find local myths and legends. These mountains are able to achieve cult status only through Danuser’s work of art, by imaginatively changing their location through his reference to Mount Fuji—or, especially in the photograph of the Eggberg, through the success of a miseen-scène that is so rich in impressions of the mountain, veiling the peak in moonlight, that the work’s presentation in the exhibition under the title The Mount Fuji of Davos leaves no doubt: this is an artistic appropriation of the mountain’s form and its appearance as Fuji. The Eggberg, which is otherwise “poor” in references, can thus rise up to great form—not least because Danuser has taken the liberty of moving the high valley of Davos closer, so to speak, to the high valley of St. Antönien, whose cultural landscape (which has always forced the residents to live with the danger of ava-

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13: Katsushika Hokusai, Fuji through a Knothole (Fushiana no Fuji): Detatched page from One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku hyakkei) Vol. 3, ca. 1835–1847, woodblock-printed book page, ink on paper, paper: 22.8 × 14.8 cm, Harvard Art ­Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of the Friends of Arthur B. Duel, Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College. 14: Katsushika Hokusai, Fuji Seen from Musashino (Musashino no Fuji): Detatched page from One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku hyakkei) Vol. 3, ca. 1835–1847, woodblock printed book page, ink on paper, paper: 22.8 × 14.8 cm, Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of the Friends of Arthur B. Duel, Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

lanches) reminded the artist of how Ernst Ludwig Kirchner experienced nature near Davos. A knowledge of art history and decades of experience in these mountain worlds can be combined here because Danuser perceives and works with the distance of the urban artist who has an international standing and art historical knowledge. The viewer, too, thus becomes privy to associative links, to connections in content beyond the concretion of geography and facts. And this is why one starts thinking about the connections between the danger of avalanches, hazardous scree slopes, and the fear of volcanic eruptions. Fear and fascination—another transnational connection between these mountains. Yet Katsushika Hokusai had in fact already displaced “his” Fuji into utterly new local spheres and social spaces—for instance, when he presented Fuji Seen from the Dyers’ Quarter (fig.  12) or Fuji through a Knothole (fig.  13), which rendered this great

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mountain very small, or when he depicted the beautiful volcano from more unusual perspectives (Fuji Seen from Musashino, fig. 14).23 Most likely drawing from the work of Kawamura Minsetsu, whose body of work, including the illustrated book One Hundred Fujis from 1767, was itself quite original in his day, Hokusai was able to develop a seemingly endless creative power through new views of Fuji.24 In doing so he counteracted the canonized idol without destroying the ideogram, thus contributing to the success of his collection of Fuji woodcuts. These more broadly belonged to a modern flood of images with the Fuji motif that has continued to this day, and that can only be explained in this form in the context of the urban cult of Fuji in Edo that existed around the year 1800.25 From a bit of a distance, one can understand Danuser’s artistic trick in referring back to an icon that he as an artist has recognized as a “sign” available to him beyond geography, culture, and local significance. He is playing with this icon and this ideogram. Yet his pictorial symbol—the “delta,” the “volcano”—is precisely not completely abstract; the contextualizing images of the Schiahorn, the Sulzfluh, and the Eggberg quite concretely link it to the landscape of Davos, and of Switzerland. Out of the similarity that the triangle provides as a transnational and transhistorical form, Danuser works here as a conceptual artist to craft a transnational image transfer between “his” mountains, Davos and Mount Fuji. The looser the specific, local reference (and it is very loose upon closer examination), the stronger the presence of the artwork in its insistence on being materially evident, in ultimately employing this image transfer in order to be itself—autonomous, timeless. Here at the latest it becomes clear why Danuser did not reference the most famous mountains in Switzerland—the Weissfluhjoch in Davos or the Matterhorn or the Monte Rosa. Like Hokusai, he also needs the witty, blasphemous, thought-provoking game of deception between big and small, importance and irrelevance. The image, I wrote above, is not something Hans Danuser draws upon. This is true. In a complicated way, he produces an artifact that combines photographic material, the material of the volcano, and the rock of the mountain into one object. What that is, exactly—something between an image and an object—is an artist’s brilliant rebellion against photography. Danuser does this so that he can claim to have newly reinvented the medium. No one has to believe him, and no one has to be convinced of his agenda. The exclusivity of having seen the originals in Davos and being able to physically view them in the future, rather than seeing reproductions, is certainly the “idea” of this photography as art, in its complicated position at the nexus of art and visual media. But Danuser has also considered the question of the original and the unique work in his flexible approach to the possibilities of digital reproduction and composition. He creatively adjusted his collection of images for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (March 2, 2019) or for this book, for instance, guided by firm ideas as to how the color and material

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would ultimately look in print. Here, too, he draws on Japanese woodcuts and their publication as mass commodities. Like Hokusai, Danuser knows how to make the most of the artworld and the world of mass media without giving up his claim to artistic originality and quality.26

The Work and the Artist: Autobiography as Inscription in the Oeuvre and the Role of “Davos” as a Place Around 1920, Paul Klee decided to stop producing self-portraits.27 The work as a whole was to be identical with the artist. Danuser has not produced any self-portraits. Yet his work is so inseparably connected with the materials and motifs of his native canton of Grisons that it is tempting to ask whether, despite all his abstraction and conceptualism, Hans Danuser is not struggling to produce a self-portrait meant to be visible in his oeuvre, his entire body of work. A self-portrait is expected to resemble the artist, to exhibit his attributes. What if Danuser were to have replaced resemblances and attributes with references to where he comes from? Strong identifying elements of the individual would replace the traditional image of the artist; they would be recognizable, even if abstract. The artist would show himself by means of material, localization, and concept, thereby remaining much more mysterious than artists who pose and represent themselves in self-portraits. Artists have almost always used selfportraits to emphasize their social status or even the prestige of their status as outsiders, for instance, as a dandy. Even a decision to eliminate one’s own face invokes a clear reference to the self-portrait as an image of the face and body. Either way, the portrait would stop at superficialities.28 Yet Danuser’s self-inscription as an artist into his work, and into the materials and places he works with, signifies a far more comprehensive claim to unify life and art. Since the artist is absent, as a face and body, one could speak here of a withdrawal into the work. But isn’t the ego only seemingly obscured? In the same way that the Mount Fuji of Davos is enveloped in mist while still appearing to be extremely present (see the image with which this essay began)? Were the artist Hans Danuser to become one with the earth and the mountains that occupy him, he would have conveyed the claim eternal significance in the best possible way. What role might Davos play here? Davos is the city in Europe with the highest elevation and is considered a place of modern literature, art, and architecture. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) and medical innovations for curing tuberculosis patients made the city famous; Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was active here, and the architect Rudolf Gaberel broke with the traditional idyll of Swiss farmhouses with his flatroofed architecture.29 Last but not least, Davos is where the World Economic Forum takes place, which has by now also become a stage for famous Hollywood actors such

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as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Davos is famously rich in art and science. Not even St. Moritz, a chic ski resort with a global pull, can challenge Davos for this synthesis of geographic, artistic, and scientific significance. Danuser’s connection to Davos is at least twofold, and, practically speaking, threefold: 1) Like Thomas Mann with his novel (which, by the way, the residents of Davos considered to be extremely detrimental to their image as a “place of healing”), Danuser seeks to combine art and science. 2) He seeks (and finds) Davos as a site of modern art, where fine art and architecture are unified, rather than having a strong emphasis on art as an image alone, as is often the case today. 3) He exhibits his work in the Kirchner Museum Davos, which was founded in 1982 in a building designed by the Zurich-based architects Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer, which has been designated as a Swiss national cultural heritage site. The museum is also where Danuser chose to install a large advertisement for the exhibition, on the building’s flat roof. From a meta perspective, one should note and more precisely analyze the fact that Davos is a place densely occupied, even overdetermined, by art and architecture, medicine, and the natural sciences. All of these references are part of Danuser’s work, which is why Davos can, for him, become a nucleus—perhaps the nucleus. It may be somewhat unfortunate that Davos has long since lost its role as a sanitarium for the disease of tuberculosis, so widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that it no longer promises “healing,” as an artist might wish. But Davos is still connoted with the healing of illness, even if it is only healing from the global evils of an uncontrolled world economy. In the days of Davos as a sanitorium, an infection of tuberculosis was manifested by the coughing up of blood and the onset of fever. Patients whose bodies were overheated were sent on strolls in the mountains because the doctors didn’t know what else to do. It was the introduction of a radical regime—resting cures of up to ten hours, authoritarian management of the sanitorium—that finally led to amazing successes. Gone were the “cures” of patients residing in pensions and hotels and indulging in everyday pleasures, free from any control by doctors. Is it not the case that Danuser’s “delta” and series of works inscribe a comparable order into the chaos of a volcanic eruption? That he as artist/scientist allows reason to prevail in the face of escalation? Instead of fear of the volcano, he offers a precise, almost relaxed conception. From a metaperspective. In a way similar to how doctors/ scientists in the climatic health resort of Davos, where chaos reigned supreme, imposed a strict discipline based first of all on the sanitorium’s modern architecture, Danuser offers his own rational logic, launched with great sophistication in cooperation with institutions and scientists, to offer art as a stabilizer for an increasingly chaotic world situation. The necessity of infiltrating, for this purpose, the material of the photographic paper with color as a foreign body is his invention. He works, in other words, in microareas in order to deal with the bigger picture. This approach isn’t

Uncalibrated: From the Standpoint of Color—Hans Danuser

all that far off from the microbiologists of the nineteenth century, who ultimately contributed to Davos losing its status as a sanitorium for a paradigmatic infectious disease. Today it is an artist who is reuniting the semantic threads of “Davos” as a place of nature and culture—primarily in service of his own oeuvre, but also in service of the place itself, which is thus regifted a piece of its myth through the synthesis and mystery that Danuser has chosen as principles of his work. It is good that this gift is not given without reference to the paradigms of our era: a) in that Danuser grapples with the credibility of the material artwork while simultaneously inscribing the erosion of this belief; b) in that geology and scree, as well as the avalanche barriers that have been constructed on the mountains, profit, so to speak, from the cult status of Mount Fuji, while also pointing to the potential dangers of climate change. Such dangers are visible in snow avalanches, or in the terrible, unbelievable masses of huge boulders and currents of mud that crashed into the valley below Piz Cengalo in August 2017. Danuser’s project doesn’t directly refer to this disaster, especially given that he has been working on his series and cycles since the 1990s. Yet these kinds of current problems have been accruing in his work, so that such dramatic, eruptive events become bound up with the multiple references and meanings of his pictures/objects. This accumulation of significance and topicality is made possible by Danuser’s artistic ability to interweave the contemporary and the timeless—and surely also because, as a native of Grisons, he has a very keen eye on the long-term geological characteristics and transformations of this mountain world in the era of global climate change.

Notes 1

The theory of photography from the 1970s has continued to be an object of critical discussion and revision to this day. See Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson, eds., The Meaning of Photography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 2 On photography’s functions of showing and proving, see Herta Wolf, ed., Zeigen und/oder Beweisen: Die Fotografie als Kulturtechnik und Medium des Wissens, Studies in Theory and History of Photography 7 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). 3 See Philip Ursprung, “Abstraction and Empathy: Hans Danuser’s Volcano Series,” in Hans Danuser: The Mount Fuji of Davos, exh. cat., ed. Thorsten Sadowsky, Kirchner Museum Davos (Heidelberg; Berlin: Kehrer, 2018), 59–64. Ursprung productively enlists Alfred Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1907) to explain “Danuser’s approach”: “Since the beginning of his career, Danuser has viewed photography—a medium that, from the mid-nineteenth century to this day has, if you will, shown a particular affinity for the ‘theory of empathy’ and ‘natural beauty’—in terms of what Worringer [...] defined as the ‘urge to abstraction’” (64). 4 See Gerd Folkers, “‘Matography’—The-One-Million-Pound-Project,” in Hans Danuser (see note 3), 87–97. 5 Ibid., 87, 89.

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  6 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 14.   7 See Urs Stahel’s text: http://www.hans-danuser.ch/erosion.html. Accessed January 6, 2020. See also Reto Hänny, HELLDUNKEL: Ein Bilderbuch (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994). (The starting point for Reto Hänny’s novel is the work cycles by Hans Danuser, In Vivo; Frozen Embryo Series, an installation of writing and images, as well as Landscapes, a wall painting with fourteen tableaus in the Bündner Museum of Fine Arts). For a more extensive discussion, see Christof Kübler, “Grenzverschiebung und Interaktion: Der Fotograf Hans Danuser, der Architekt Peter Zumthor und der Schriftsteller Reto Hänny,” in Georges Bloch Annual— University of Zurich, Institute of Art History, vol. 2, ed. Helmut Brinker et al. (Zurich: University of Zurich, Institute of Art History, 1995), here especially 163–164 and 175–181, under the apt heading “The ­Language Darkroom.” For the digitized version of the Georges Bloch Annual, see https://www.khist.uzh.ch/de/forschung/ZSHA.html, accessed January 6, 2020. Compare the inserts in the book Weltenbilder, ed. Nanni Baltzer and Wolfgang Kersten, Studies in Theory and History of Photography 1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), as well as the equally philosophical and concrete conception of art that Danuser develops in Neuerfindung der Photographie—Hans Danuser: Gespräche, Materialien, Analysen in the fourth volume of the series Studies in Theory and History of Photography, ed. by Hans Danuser and Bettina Gockel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014).   8 Cited in Thorsten Sadowsky, “The Mount Fuji of Davos: Introduction and Acknowledgments,” in Hans Danuser (see note 3), 10.   9 Anyone who thinks this project—elevating photography as a form of art—has long been concluded, inasmuch as photography has been established in the art sector for some time, fails to recognize the longue durée of photography’s myths and topics; this history has repeatedly forced the medium back into the service of picturing reality. (And one could have expected that there would be an autonomous system of photography; but that has not been established. The arts of the 1960s and 1970s might have needed photography to renew themselves. However, the art sector was dominant and includes to this day photography in a creative way. The most important battleground of photography was and is always its potential as evidence.) 10 See Gerd Folkers, “Back to ‘Matography,’” in Hans Danuser (see note 3), 93–94. 11 In this transition, many natural scientists pursued what was called “physical theo­logy,” which sought out evidence for the presence of God in nature and natural phenomena. This approach gradually gave way to purely empirical research. See Gabriele Dürbeck, Bettina Gockel, Susanne B. Keller, et al., eds., Wahrnehmung der Natur, Natur der Wahrnehmung: Studien zur Geschichte visueller Kultur um 1800 (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2001), particularly the essays by Irmgard Müsch, Gerhard Wiesenfeld, and Susanne B. Keller. 12 See the essay by Susanne B. Keller in Wahrnehmung der Natur, Natur der Wahrnehmung (note 9, 117–133) on vulcanism or plutonism versus neptunism in the work of the artist/geologist and peintre du roi Jean Hoüel (1735–1813). Hoüel engaged extensively with Etna, which at the time was still little known and barely researched (Keller, 120). He can be understood as both an artist and naturalist researcher. This type of figure, uniting art and science, was of considerable significance for the eighteenth century and, ultimately, for the modern period in terms of an empirical reorientation of art. Danuser continually invokes this type for himself and his own work. 13 The selection of individual volcanoes—here the reference is to the Kilimanjaro massif, which is listed on the World Heritage list—would require a separate discussion.

Uncalibrated: From the Standpoint of Color—Hans Danuser

14 See D. G. Robinson, U. Ehlers et al., Präparationsmethodik in der Elektronenmikroskopie: Eine ­Einführung für Biologen und Mediziner (Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer, 1985), 130–131. For a ­specific discussion of the “matography” process, see the section “Chemical ­Parenthesis” in Folkers, Hans Danuser (see note 3), 89–92. 15 Stieglitz wrote in 1899: “A new field of possibilities has been opened to him [the artist in general, B. G.], and the prospects for the future of pictorial photography have become much brighter with its advent” (Alfred Stieglitz, “The Progress of Pictorial Photography in the United States,” American Annual of Photography and the Photographic Times Almanac for 1899: 158). 16 Compare Bettina Gockel, “Making a Digital Research Project in the History of Modern Art and Photography: The Art and Photo Magazine ‘Camera Work,’” in Maria ­Effinger et al., eds., Von analogen und digitalen Zugängen zur Kunst: Festschrift für Hubertus Kohle zum 60. Geburtstag, https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.493. See also the open-access version of “Camera Work” based on the original, with extensive tables of contents for each issue: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/camera_work. Accessed January 6, 2020. Additionally: Constance McCabe, ed., Platinum and Palladium Photographs: Technical History, Connoisseurship, and Preservation (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2017). 17 For a discussion of the various aspects of the Fuji cult, see Timothy Clark, 100 Views of Mount Fuji (London: British Museum Press, 2001), 17–18. 18 Paul Klee, Paul Klee: Creative Confession (London: Tate Publishing, 2013), n.p.; see also Paul Klee, Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 118. 19 See especially Clark, 100 Views of Mount Fuji (see note 17). 20 See Wolfgang Kemp, Von Gestalt gesteigert zu Gestalt: Hokusais 100 Ansichten des Fuji (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2006). 21 Compare for example the travel reports or advertisements in “Magazin Z” published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in the issue “Die Substanz des Stils,” October 2019, here especially, “Destination,” 45–47; see https://z.nzz.ch/. Accessed January 6, 2020. 22 See https://www.suedtirol.info/de/erleben/oberholz-mountain-hut_activity_7366145. Accessed January 6, 2020. 23 Wolfgang Kemp writes about this: “Hokusai deviates from the well-trodden paths, places without references are more important to him than those with them, but his real ambition could be a remapping […] The unbelievable success of his two Fuji series and the number of imitations prove that the time was ripe for this sort of ‘change of location.’” Kemp, Von Gestalt gesteigert zu Gestalt (see note 20), 28. (English translation). 24 See Clark, 100 Views of Mount Fuji (see note 17), fig. 8. 25 Ibid., 20: “Indeed, the sheer quantity of Fuji imagery produced in the form of colour woodblock prints and book illustrations between 1830 and 1858 must surely have exceeded the total produced by all artists up to that date put together.” 26 The comparison with Hokusai’s prints is illuminating for the additional reason that there is a media connection between Danuser’s antiphotography and Hokusai’s prints. Antiphotography (i.e., a position against the myth of photography as a depiction of reality) can also mean a return to the beginnings of photography, as commonly located in Nicéphore Niépce’s heliogravures, which were intended to be printed graphic reproductions. At this starting point, photography was a singular work, thus fulfilling per se an important criterion of art. Indeed, Danuser’s unique pieces are subtly reminiscent of the shimmering materiality of Niépce’s copper plates.

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27 See Bettina Gockel, Die Pathologisierung des Künstlers: Künstlerlegenden der Moderne (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), chapter “Klee’s Genius,” 187–197; especially 190 and 196–197: “Inasmuch as the overall work and its (supposed) order seems to allow the control of inspired, ingenious image ideas or at least provides a rational framework for them, Klee can give up working on self-image that would make its arguments in a physical or psychological terms in favor of his oeuvre. The encipherment and aesthetic excess of this oeuvre provides constant evidence for Klee’s superior rational genius. Klee thus succeeds in squaring the circle, so to speak. He has configured his persona as at once ingenious and rational, inexhaustibly imaginative and punctilious, mysterious and recognizably bourgeois in its social attitude. […] The balancing of the polarity of genius and reason and the depersonalization in favor of Klee’s oeuvre enables Klee to elude fixed attributions to the artist, at least to the extent that research into political history and art history has been able to prove the existence of many different personae called Klee. The success of Klee’s self-construction lies in the gradual ­failure of these interpretations, none of which has been able to completely gain acceptance.” (English translation). 28 For a discussion of the self-portrait, see Ulrich Pfisterer and Valeska von Rosen, eds., Der Künstler als Kunstwerk: Selbstporträts vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005). 29 See Christof Kübler, Wider den hermetischen Zauber: Rationalistische Erneuerung alpiner Architektur um 1930: Rudolf Gaberel und Davos (Chur: Verlag Bündner Monatsblatt/Desertina AG, 1997).

Color s

Kim Timby

The Colors of Black-and-White Photography

In 1857, an English critic made a vivid observation about photography and color after visiting an exhibition of recent pictures: “Colour, with all its witcheries, is still too airy a Proteus to be easily captured and chained to the photographer’s area railings. Our works are but monochrome studies: now golden brown, anon of a rich, reddish sepia tone; now grey and lucid, presently almost of a black Indian ink lustre; but still, in one form or another, monochromes, with all their merits and deficiencies, soft, even, beautifully modelled, rich-toned as Rembrandt, sweet and mellow as Correggio.”1 Although recording the colors of the world remained a dream—color was “still too airy a Proteus to be easily captured”—the hues photographs presented were subtle and diverse, ranging from golden brown and reddish sepia to gray or black. The palette of photography incited references to Rembrandt and Correggio, renowned masters of effects of light and shade created using a reduced range of tones. Photography of the 1850s may have been monochromatic, but it was anything but a monotonous “black and white” imagery drained of color. Monochrome photographs are now commonly referred to as being “in black and white” but before photographing “in color” became common, from the mid-1930s, a vibrant chromatic culture existed in photography. Scholarly interest in print color as a cultural phenomenon, however, has been very limited and historicization of its vocabulary inexistent.2 This paper addresses the disjunction between the colors of early photographs on paper and the way they are described today. It evaluates what colors “black-and-white” photographs actually were and how the photographic community engaged with the issue of print coloration in the nineteenth and early twen­ tieth centuries. Through a close analysis of the vocabulary used to describe and categorize color (or its perceived absence) in photography, print coloration and its lexicon emerge as meaningful, interdependent artifacts for understanding how individuals

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1: Aubrée, Traité de photographie sur papier, sur verre et sur plaques métalliques, 1851, stained photography manual, private collection.

used an unprecedentedly mechanical image-making technique as a means of creation. Daguerreotypes, recorded on a polished silver plate, displayed an image in which the light areas were matte and the dark areas were highly reflective and—to be viewed properly—dependent upon the proximity of dark objects that they could mirror. Except for the formation of blue in overexposed areas, their inherent coloration varied little. Paper photographs, however, had a wide variety of shades that were influenced by the chemistries used to create them. Starting from the inadvertent colors of photography like the browns of the chemically stained 1851 photographic manual in figure 1, practitioners of photography on paper used color in intentional ways. As a malleable aspect of photographic aesthetics, print color was perceived as a marker of artistry and talent when displayed in ways judged pleasing, and certain tones had particularly artistic connotations. “Natural” color was flagrantly absent from photography, but cultural color thrived. The term “black and white” was foreign to the 1850s, emerging at the end of the nineteenth century as a way to describe a particular type of photographic coloration.

The Colors of Black-and-White Photography

“Black and white” progressively went from one color of photography among many to being both the preferred photographic coloration and the accepted generic term for qualifying monochrome photography as a whole. This is ultimately a story about color photography, too, then—about the creation of two categories of photography: one with color and one without it. Via “black and white,” monochrome photography was reconceptualized as the opposite of “color” photography, each epitomizing essential aspects of a medium construed as faithful to vision and yet quite distant from it in its concretization of light and shadow.

The Salted-Paper Palette In the processes used to make photographs on paper, colors were the result of chemical reactions. William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of paper photography, obtained shades including violet, brick red, warm browns with pinkish or yellowish overtones, and cooler blackish tones with a tinge of green.3 Fox Talbot noted in his The Pencil of Nature (1844) that there was “some variety in the tint” of a photograph depending on exposure time and the paper used.4 He didn’t seek specific colors, however. After consulting “several persons of taste,” he found that opinions on the most suitable tone varied and concluded that it was “best to admit whichever appeared pleasing to the eye, without aiming at an uniformity which is hardly obtainable.”5 A particular palette of tones was possible in photography, and although photographers could not determine colors outright they quickly learned to influence them. A decade after The Pencil of Nature, a British photography manual cited an evocative list of print shades along with chemical substances found useful for obtaining them: “red, changing to black in the sunshine,” “a fine brown,” “a rich brown inclining to purple,” “very red,” “a brick red,” “yellowish brown,” “sometimes yellowish, often a steel blue,” “mouse colour,” “dark brown,” yellowish brown,” “deep brown, which blackens,” and “red brown of a peculiarly rich tint.”6 This list is coherent with photographs of the mid-1850s in good condition today: prints were generally of various hues of brown—sometimes a warm reddish or yellowish brown, sometimes a colder brown leaning towards purple or blue or even so neutral as to appear almost black. The nuanced colors described also suggest how tricky working with print color could be. In the 1840s and 1850s, photographers prepared and processed their own photosensitive materials. Varied print colors were evident and, as Fox Talbot had observed, clearly influenced by many variables including paper choice, exposure time, the strength or age of the chemical baths, and, of course, the chemical composition of the recipes used. Print colors weren’t completely haphazard nor were they simply chosen from a set number of options imposed by photographic chemistry: the ability to control print coloration with subtlety was a skill those with any artistic ambition were encouraged

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to master in the 1850s. Over the first two decades of photography, active members of the photographic community developed and circulated instructions for obtaining photographs on paper with colors considered more desirable than those initially and more easily produced. One important technique, known today as “toning,” was a chemical treatment near the end of processing that made colors colder and less subject to fading.7 The words of photographer Thomas Sutton in 1857 summed up how compulsory toning had then become: “A fixed sun-print is always of a ‘hideous brickred tint,’ and is consequently unpresentable until it has been toned by some process.”8 The sought-after colors were described by Sutton as “various shades of brown to a black, or purple black.”9 Articles in photographic publications of the 1850s abounded with technical information on print tone. Thomas Frederick Hardwich, a specialist in photographic chemistry, described various influences on color and the palettes associated with certain chemistries. One recipe produced prints that were “unusually red after fixing, and of a brown or mulberry colour when toned.”10 Another gave prints “of a sepia colour after fixing, and usually of a pure black or a purple-black when toned.” Albumen prints were “usually of a brown tone, or with a shade of purple when the gold [toning] bath is newly made and active.” Another type of print darkened “to brick-red in the fixing bath” with toned positives “usually of a violet-purple or of a bistre tint.” Color was frequently what differentiated descriptions of various recipes for photography. As certain photographers—often artistically inclined wealthy amateurs—came to choose paper photography over the daguerreotype for its specific practical and visual qualities, the finer points of its aesthetics didn’t go unattended. Color mattered, and it was much more subtle and varied than the common summary of printing techniques of the 1850s—two processes: salted paper and albumen—would lead us to believe. A general consensus appears to have existed on what good print colors were, with deep browns that were more or less black, violet, or purple considered universally pleasing. This convergence of opinion is visible from the colors of photographs of quality available to us today. It is also implicit in reviews of photography exhibitions of the mid-1850s, where it was surprisingly rare for a critic to describe a successful color. In one example, a reviewer of the 1856 Manchester photographic exhibition noted the “exquisite mellow black” of views of Cambridge by the photographer Cantab.11 Or at the 1857 exhibition of the Société Française de Photographie, the society’s journal singled out a portrait by Nadar: “The head of the apostle Jean Journet, lifted towards the heavens, has splendid light and is vigorous in its tone and overall effect. One is tempted to say that it is painted because in expression and color this study is reminiscent of works by [Jusepe de] Ribera.”12 Although no particular tint is cited, this comparison to the seventeenth-century Tenebrist painter evokes the deep warm tones of darkness lit by candlelight—coloration coherent with known prints of this photograph including the one pictured in figure 2.

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2: Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), The Apostle Preacher Jean Journet, 1857, salted paper print, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

A sense of what were considered good print colors within the possibilities evoked in manuals can also be constructed from criticism of unusual tones. Reds and yellows were particularly controversial. At the 1855 World’s Fair, critic and photographer Paul Périer remarked unfavorably on a reddish tinge in what he considered otherwise splendid prints by Olympe Aguado and lamented that Henri Le Secq was going “even further towards intense rust tones than his fellow photographers.”13 At the 1856 Manchester photographic exhibition, photographs by the Bisson Frères were, for another critic, “very good […] but in many of them the red tone robs the deep shadows, which should be darker; indeed most of them look as though they had never been toned at all!”14 Although a number of talented photographers pushed their prints toward reddish brown, some viewers associated this aesthetic with bad printing. Yellow tones

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3: Gustave Le Gray, Landscape study in Fontainebleau, 1849, salted paper print, Serge Kakou, Paris.

were also particularly debatable, connoting decay and illness. Regarding a lake view by Dominique Roman at the 1855 World’s Fair, Périer noted that “people were criticizing the print’s yellowish tint,” but he defended this tone as “warm and most agreeable.”15 When Humbert de Molard reviewed the 1856 photographic exhibition in Brussels, he scathingly signaled out a yellow tinge in images by Mr. Barboni: “They have […] an unpleasant yellow tone, which already, mistakenly, makes them look old and worn.”16 Another critic lambasted views at an 1858 exhibition in London “which are of such a yellow colour, that the inspection of them recalled unpleasant associations of jaundice.”17 Although exceptionally warm tones were most perilous, colder colors were not necessarily beyond criticism. In one instance, Périer criticized prints by James Robertson at the 1855 World’s Fair for their “slate blue” tone “that lacked strength and warmth.”18 Tastes varied when it came to extremes but it was clearly in vogue to experiment with print coloration in the second half of the 1850s. As artistically inclined photographers cultivated paper photography and shared their work within an international community, exploration of color had become an important part of aesthetic expres-

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sion and even a distinguishing element or a marker of virtuosity for some. One of the first photographers to master the chromatic outcome of printing and explore a diversity of tones was Gustave Le Gray, renowned for both his artistry and his technical inventiveness. The rocky landscape pictured in figure 3 illustrates a type of color seen in Le Gray’s work before 1851. It is a soft brown with both olive and red undertones. An appropriate adjective to describe this color might be “bister”—a substance derived from the soot of burned wood and used to make wash drawings. Bister was in the brown family and was described in dictionaries as a dark or reddish brown. What this meant to an 1850s viewer is likely best visualized not by using words but by comparison with the common French “bistre” stamp of the time.19 Early on, Le Gray produced a variety of print colors. For example, the jury of the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 described Le Gray’s photographs as “vary[ing], in tint, from sepia to olive citrine.”20 Critics started remarking a wider chromatic diversity in his work starting in the fall of 1851, as he began showing prints of views of French monuments recorded that summer with Auguste Mestral for the Mission Héliographique. Art critic Francis Wey described these photographs as “more or less bister” but implied that in practice they tended towards a variety of tones like vermillion or licorice.21 Henri de Lacretelle was

4: Gustave Le Gray, Cloister of the Abbey of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, 1851, salted paper print, Serge Kakou, Paris.

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even more explicit as to new and different colors: “Mr. Le Gray has a palette in photography: his tints are infinitely varied.”22 Figure 4 is one of the Mission Héliographique photographs. It is remarkable for a stunning deep, cold blue tone rarely seen in prints of the day—a color Le Gray possibly meant to convey a nocturnal, moonlight effect also evoked by Lacretelle.23 In 1851, Le Gray was perfecting the techniques he used to print positives from his waxed-paper negatives (invented earlier the same year), and he insisted on the importance of color as he promoted his new printing techniques. On November 17, 1851, he deposited a sealed document at the Académie des Sciences called “Notes on positive paper prints of a great variety of colors and with more complete fixity than using older processes.”24 In this paper, he described the tones obtained as “black, white, blue black, water green, and the black of prints on rice paper.”25 Le Gray discussed his techniques more publicly in early 1852 in the photography journal La Lumière, giving details on how to produce “bluish black in the shadows,” “a marked black tone in the shadows,” “greenish black and blue-green,” or further still “purple-black” obtained using gold toning.26 When visiting Le Gray’s studio in 1853, La Lumière critic Charles Gaudin couldn’t help but raise the issue of color: The “richly nuanced tone” of Le Gray’s photographs “is always incredibly transparent; sometimes a velvety greenish blue, sometimes a warm bister, it is all his own.”27 Study of prints made by Le Gray after 1851 indeed demonstrates a new subtlety in coloration, with tones that were darker and often colder than the bister of his early production.28 Sylvie Aubenas notes that the examples cited in communications to the scientific community accurately describe the beautiful chromatic diversity of his Mission Héliographique prints, which range “from deep black to orange-yellow, including dark brown, olive green, and slate blue.”29 For Anne de Mondenard and Marc Pagneux, these print tones are characteristic enough to help attribute works to the select group of practitioners who took lessons from Le Gray.30 Indeed, a number of the photographers mentioned for their unusual colors in 1850s exhibition reviews—including Le Secq and Aguado, amongst those cited above—were students of Le Gray. Although the capacity to obtain Le Gray’s exact colors was out of reach for most photographers, the exhibition of his work and his publication of photography manuals (in 1850, 1851, 1852, and 1854) further contributed to wide interest in print coloration and a taste for subtle color as a marker of artistic talent. Along with Le Gray, another Frenchman, Louis Désiré Blanquart-Évrard, was a crucial instigator of novel print coloration. In the early 1850s, Blanquart-Évrard developed what contemporaries considered his signature tones, qualified as gray or blackviolet in comparison with the warm browns usually seen at the time. Figure 5, a view of Egypt taken by Maxime Du Camp and printed by Blanquart-Évrard in 1852, presents an example of these groundbreaking colors. It was part of a series Du Camp had Blanquart-Évrard print after his 1849–1851 trip to Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, and Syria.

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5: Maxime Du Camp, Ibsamboul, Colosse Médial du Spéos de Phré (Colossus, Abu Simbel), 1850, salt print by Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Évrard, 1852, Serge Kakou, Paris.

The resulting photographs were widely admired for their overall quality and tint, described as gray because of its exceptional neutrality. “Mr. Blanquart held the secret to producing the most intense blacks,” declared photographer-scientist MarcAntoine Gaudin in 1853. The prints for Du Camp were the best Blanquart-Évrard had made, esteemed Gaudin—of a “misty gray” and not too black or dull like some of his other work.31 Blanquart-Évrard, like Le Gray, was well known for technical innovations and was instrumental in the establishment of the calotype in France. He started publishing details of processes for photography on paper in 1847, referring to print colors ranging from “a beautiful shade of brown” to “bister” to “the black of aquatints.”32 The year 1851 was a milestone for color for Blanquart-Évrard, too, with the

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opening of his now renowned commercial printing establishment.33 This venture required the rapid production of numerous positives. Blanquart-Évrard’s solution was to use a developing-out process—a principle already used for recording negatives but rarely for positives. It produced prints after an exposure of only three to twenty seconds in Blanquart-Évrard’s studios in the northern French town of Lille—and because of its chemistry, it tended to produce colors that were black or black-violet compared to traditional salted paper prints.34 Photographic albums published by Blanquart-Évrard were widely viewed in the photographic community, giving visibility to his chromatic innovations. Historian Anne McCauley notes in his photographs “variations in color […] which extend from a rich blue-black with cream lights to a paler sepia with peach unexposed areas.”35 The colors that attracted the attention of contemporaries were the darkest or most neutral ones. The public was divided on the beauty of these tones, but recognized them as un­­ usual in photography. One English critic found that the “beautiful grey” of Du Camp’s photographs made them look too much like lithographs and preferred “the warm sepia tint” more common in photography.36 The jury of the 1851 Great Exhibition was much less impressed (possibly basing its assessment on earlier attempts), noting: “Several of the pictures are dark and blotty, and somewhat resemble engravings taken from a worn-out plate.”37 English photographer Thomas Sutton, on the other hand, was particularly enamored with the work of the specialist from Lille. He wrote in 1855: “The French Violet Tints, when sufficiently neutral, and not dead, or inky, or sooty, are, I think, the most agreeable that have yet been obtained.” He added: “The most favorable specimens that I have seen in this style are in the ‘Album photo­ graphique’ of M. Blanquart-Evrard.”38 A strong sign of the desirability of BlanquartÉvrard’s new colors for some viewers were the offers he reportedly received—and refused—from Prince Albert then Thomas Sutton to purchase his secrets. BlanquartÉvrard eventually established a partnership with Sutton, in 1855, and in 1862 Sutton published previously undisclosed details of his methods, including the exposure of the finished prints for several weeks in a greenhouse to help turn them the signature color Sutton called violet or purple-black.39 Sutton insisted that although the process was tedious, one was rewarded by prints that were “extraordinary” for their beautiful coloration in both the highlights and the shadows.40 Le Gray and Blanquart-Évrard were foremost in inspiring the chromatic creativity witnessed in the second half of the 1850s. Their influence is confirmed by remarks in England and the United States in the mid-1850s regarding darker, colder colors being a French specialty. Le Gray was known early on for his espousal of gold toning— drawing the remark from Francis Wey in 1853, for example, that Le Gray’s photographs were unrivaled, “especially thanks to the use of gold chloride, which makes it possible to bring out details hidden in the darkest shadows.”41 Other French photographers became early adopters of gold toning and to a lesser degree the developing-out

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process used by Blanquart-Évrard, and foreign publications gradually provided details of these techniques.42 An 1854 American photography manual reported that the “rich dark violet tint, so much admired in many French pictures” was obtained by gold toning.43 The same year, an English manual included a section called “The black tints of French photographs” and advised: “To those who prefer the very black tones which characterize the productions of M. Blanquart Evrard […] the following formula and mode of operation, as recommended by Le Gray in a recent edition of his work, may be acceptable.”44 In the early 1850s, when the practice of paper photography was recent and still very experimental, the photographic community decidedly seized upon print tone as one of the things that made photography an art. In 1853, the critic Francis Wey noted color as part of a wide range of photographic effects, the mastery of which took photography beyond simple mechanical recording: “[T]he improvements introduced by Mr.  Blanquart make it possible for him to obtain prints of any nuance, from bister to the purest blue or black, and to make at will, according to the nature or the features of the drawing, subtle images with soft effects or forceful prints with contrast, like Rembrandt’s interior scenes or Piranesi’s engravings of monuments. Here, we have completely entered the domain of art.”45 Similarly, when Périer reviewed photographs displayed at the 1855 World’s Fair, he argued that no photograph was ever identical and that amongst all the variables influencing the aspect of a print, “the photographer must decide.” Therein lay “the role of the artist.”46 This positive reception of nuanced print color was aided by the existence of a centuries-old argument on the relative roles of “drawing” and “color” in painting.47 The topic was discussed in the columns of the French photography journal La Lumière, for example.48 Commentators called certain photographers like Charles Nègre and Charles Clifford “colorists” in the traditional sense of the word: they successfully rendered a particular mood in a scene, especially through subtle use of light and shade.49 However, a new take on the term “colorist” could be found by the end of the decade in France, seemingly encompassing the more marked tints used by some. For example, in 1857 Ernest Lacan wrote of stereoviews of Italy recently published by the Gaudin brothers: “If one weren’t afraid of being accused of wanting to apply the vocabulary of painting to photography, one could say that the author of the new excursion to Italy is a colorist because his views have warm tones and vigorous light that, without exaggeration, can be considered good, true local color.”50

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An 1857 exhibition review similarly nuanced the term “colorist” to encompass both overall effect and remarkable tint: “Mr. Roger Fenton, without sacrificing any of the sharpness and detail we described, seemed to us—if we may take the liberty of using the expression—a little more colorist than his colleagues. His effects are more evident, more vigorous, and the tones of his positives are warmer.”51 Photography’s mechanical nature and precise rendering of light and shadow were associated with “drawing.” Insisting on “color,” whether figurative or literal, was a way of insisting on the choices, talent, and taste that went into photography. Subtle print coloration in photography was color tamed. Nature’s rainbow was erased and, through the cultivation of chemical reactions, cultural color was established in its place.

The Art of Describing Photographic Color The varied vocabulary used to convey the colors of photography in the 1850s reflected the subtlety of print coloration. For all intents and purposes, throughout the 1850s, no single adjective created a consensus because the variations were too great. At best, one could only generalize about the tones obtained with a specific procedure. Nor should the frank adjectives like red, purple, blue, green, or even black that contemporaries used to describe photographs be taken at face value. They were generally understood as referring to the particular chromatic tinge of a print that was most often predominantly brown. The photographic literature abounded with evocative qualifications of print color at different stages of processing. The vocabulary used went beyond basic color words or their combination to include references to nature, like “mouse color” or “dead-leaf yellow;” to substances or materials, as in “rusty” or “brick” reds, “iron-brown,” or “steel blue;” and to edibles, as in “mulberry,” “chocolate,” “licorice,” “olive,” or “creamy” highlights.52 Darks—and lights, less often discussed— had evocative and sometimes linguistically elusive subtleties. The adjective “sepia,” widely used today to broadly qualify the coloration of paper photographs of the 1850s–1870s, was employed at the time but not in a generic sense. In the 1850s, “sepia” was one of the many shades of photography—as, for example, in the introductory quote above describing photographs as “monochrome studies: now golden brown, anon of a rich, reddish sepia tone; now grey and lucid, presently almost of a black Indian ink lustre.” Photographic specialists in the mid-1850s did, however, occasionally use the word “sepia” to refer to common photographic tones, as they had used “bister” earlier in the decade. For instance, an 1852 critic preferred “the warm sepia tint seen in many excellent specimens” of photography to the gray of Du Camp’s Blanquart-Évrard prints.53 Similarly, Robert Hunt wrote in 1854 that in calotypes, “there is a curious and beautiful variety in the tints of colour they will occasionally assume, varying from a rich golden orange to purple and black,” but he went on to

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describe how “warm sepia-coloured pictures may generally be obtained.”54 This implies that sepia was a color with wide appeal. A few years later, Thomas Sutton summed up the colors of photographs as “sepia or purple black,” likely generalizing about untoned prints (once common) and colder, toned ones.55 Most often, however— and to a certain degree even in the instances just cited—“sepia” was a particular color. Photographic coloration appears to have been too subtle and tastes to have changed too much over time for a single color term describing photographs in general to emerge. It isn’t surprising that the color and the word “sepia,” like “bister,” held particular appeal for those discussing photographic expression: sepia was also, and foremost, a specific substance and color in the art world—in this case a dark brown ink obtained from the secretions of cuttlefish. In the decades before the invention of photography, artists of the Romantic era were particularly fond of sepia.56 When the coloration of early photographs was characterized, references to art by way of sepia and other kinds of drawing and printing materials were frequent. Blanquart-Évrard was prolific in this sense. In his 1851 treatise, he described how to use one toning bath to produce black shadows with warm highlights—an effect that he likened to “an engraving on rice paper”—and another toning bath to create redder tones of “Roman sepia.”57 Chemical baths of varying compositions, ages, and dilutions were to photography, for Blanquart-Évrard, “what glazing is to oil painting.”58 When advertising his new printing establishment, he differentiated three types of prints available for order, producing the effect of “a drawing in India ink,” “a sepia drawing,” or “a leadpencil drawing.”59 The technical and linguistic appropriation of the particular spectrum of chemically produced colors offered by photography was a salient way of affirming the artistic qualities of the new medium, and the preference for different shades of brown and black was clearly tied to the familiar presence of these colors in artistic tradition—especially in printing and drawing. Early paper photography as embodied in the salted paper process that dominated the early 1850s was particularly subject to color variation, especially within an aesthetically pleasing range of warm and cool browns. It was therefore conducive to the artistic appropriation of color. As albumen paper and its more consistent browns increasingly dominated photographic practice in the 1860s and 1870s, print coloration became more homogenous, although it was still influenced by the practitioner. The dominance of albumen printing was a matter of taste, and preferences now lay clearly with the capacity of this process’s sharpness and sheen to bring out the details of glass negatives, now also widely preferred. Other photographic printing processes did exist, however. An interesting example in the context of print coloration is the cyanotype, invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842 and producing images of a characteristic Prussian blue. It is quite plausible that the cyanotype’s coloration directly contributed to its lack of success. Prussian blue wasn’t a tint of the monochrome arts

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of drawing and printing that were clearly important in the positive reception of bister, sepia, and black in photography. Another drawback of bright blue was its extreme dissimilarity to the color of most things photographed. The various shades common in photography as practiced in the 1850s–1870s were not shocking for the representation of architecture, cityscapes, landscapes, and skin tones; they were closer to these subjects than strong red or Prussian blue, for example, would have been. The photographic community clearly appropriated the palette photography allowed at a given moment, technically and chemically, cultivating colors judged appropriate to the aesthetics of a new expressive medium and to its documentary exploration.

“Black and White” as a Color In the first decades of photography, photographs weren’t in black and white nor were they described that way. They were indeed closer to sepia, although this word in no way summed up the subtle variations in print coloration. “Black and White” only started to become part of the photographic color spectrum, and the word “sepia” to be used regularly in a generic sense, during the era of industrially produced papers that started in the 1880s, when new chemistries were introduced and a different culture of photographic color developed. “Black” had already been a part of photographic vocabulary in the 1850s, when it was regularly used to qualify a dark, neutral print tone. The words “black” and “white” were also sometimes used in proximity to each other. They represented the theoretical extremes of the photographic image: the lightest lights and the darkest shadows. For example, in his 1855 calotype handbook, Thomas Sutton explained that the print could be exposed longer than strictly necessary for complete exposure “without necessarily reddening the blacks, or embrowning the whites.”60 French specialists also used “black” and “white” in this way—for example when one described the principle of photography on paper or glass as producing “an inversed image where the whites of nature are black, and vice-versa.”61 Up through the 1870s, this use of opposing notions of “black” and “white” to refer to shadow and light in photography was common. However, photography itself was never referred to as being “in black and white.” The 1880s saw the introduction of industrially produced papers made using a number of different processes. This slowly but profoundly transformed the chromatic landscape of monochrome photography. Two categories of new papers tended towards different types of colors because their chemical compositions integrated and transformed silver particles in ways that reflected light differently. Developing-out papers like gelatin silver bromide tended towards neutral gray-black tones (as they had when Blanquart-Évrard prepared them in the 1850s). Printing-out papers like those often referred to as aristotypes produced warmer colors (as printing-out processes

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6: Page from a family album with prints on different commercial papers, ca. 1890–1910, Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône.

like salted or albumen paper had before them).62 Aesthetic preference played a role as well as in this new industry. Manufacturers devised specific chemistries to provide a variety of colors judged desirable, influencing the shades of photographs; and they subtly tinted the papers used as a base, influencing the colors of light areas as well. The base of neutral-colored developing-out papers was often tinted cream or ivory, and toning these prints to obtain what was termed “sepia” became popular.63 It was also common to chemically tone printing-out papers, which naturally gave warmbrown colors, to obtain a colder purple-brown; their base layer was often tinted bluegray or lavender.64 A variety of print colors were in use during the same period and often by the same photographers, as can be observed on the pages of many family albums from the era between 1890 and 1910. Although the prints pictured in the album in figure 6 have faded a little with time, some are clearly blacker—grayer, would

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be more accurate—than others, which are better be described as brown, bister, or sepia. Color diversity was furthered around the turn of the twentieth century by the success of several artisanal or more refined photographic printing techniques. Platinotypes, or platinum prints, had rich neutral black tones compared at the time to those of an engraving, although manufacturers catering to public taste also proposed ways to make them bluer, browner, or more sepia.65 Carbon prints, known since the 1850s, were also appealing, with color determined by pigmentation, not chemistry. Ready-to-use materials for carbon prints were now sold in a variety of tones. Colors proposed by manufacturers included references like “red chalk” and “China black,” indicating that certain tones—and by extension the choice of a color itself—continued to be associated with artistic production.66 A sampler of carbon-print colors offered by the Manufacture Autotype Française (fig. 7), for example, pictured a vast range of traditional blacks and browns—including “black ink” and five shades of “sepia” (normal, dark, warm, Rembrandt, and Turner)—as well as more colorful options like “red pencil,” “light green,” “turquoise,” and “bright red.” Artisanal pigment processes like gum bichromate prints that were more difficult to master thrived in pictorialist circles, where photographers appreciated the greater subtlety and control they provided compared with industrial papers.67 By the end of the century this practice had reached a point eliciting caricature, as when a reviewer of the Photographic Salon in London in 1899 was struck by “an artificial striving after pictorial effect that is, at times, ludicrous”: “One ingenious gentleman, a very clever experimentalist no doubt, gives us: — Two Brown Studies, A Puzzle in Indigo, A Villa in Green Gum, and A Study in Coloured Chalks. They are, some of them, very nice indeed—very picturesque, full of feeling—but in our humble opinion, in certain instances, they are utterly without the bounds of legitimate photography.”68 Turn-of-the-century exhibitions and albums displayed even more color diversity than those of the 1850s, obtained with a greater variety of processes. Serious artists often eschewed industrial papers and, as in the 1850s, sought more subtle tonal range and permanence. Ordinary amateur photographers and consumers of photography clearly appreciated choice as well, and, as the naming of colors reveals, manufacturers underlined the artistry implicit in choosing colors. Around 1900, when viewers of photographs were accustomed to seeing a diversity of tones, the term “black and white” was being used to describe a particular print coloration. When industrial papers and especially gelatin silver bromide paper had been introduced in the 1880s, “black” was one of the color adjectives chosen to describe photographs. The term “black and white,” however, was at first employed only in

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7: Manufacture Autotype Française, sample colors for carbon prints, ca. 1905 (excerpts), Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône.

r­ eference to extreme sorts of prints: either to unsuccessful photographs with too much contrast or to high-contrast copy work.69 The expression “black and white” was also employed in the 1890s when photography’s lack of full-color reproduction was being noted. For example, in an article on portraiture, one specialist explained: “One of the first difficulties was the getting rid of all ideas of colour, and regarding the subject simply as a study in black and white.”70 Another noted: “Obviously we cannot represent contrasts of colour in black and white, so our work is narrowed down to correctly representing light and shade.”71 In 1890, “black and white” still referred to extremes—actual or theoretical. It wasn’t yet the color of everyday photographs, even those described as “black.”

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Readily available developing-out bromide papers and platinum printing materials, as well as a strong presence of platinotypes in photographic exhibitions, helped establish a taste for blacker dark tones and whiter highlights.72 These processes were instrumental in bringing the term “black and white” into general use to describe a particular coloration in photography. Many photographers may have chosen these processes not for their color but for their greater sensitivity and permanence, but the fact was that a new color combination was becoming established in photographic aesthetics. In 1896, for example, an English photography manual advised: “Prints on the new bromide paper, in black and white, however, are said to be permanent. The process is simple to work, and the results are exceedingly beautiful.”73 This new “black and white” was not to the taste of one 1899 observer, but now had been clearly identified and named as a particular coloration: “I have always felt, as have hundreds of others,” he wrote, “that the only drawback to the [bromide] process was that its results were in black and white, and only in black and white.” A description of toning methods for “procuring tones ranging from a light sepia to a brownish-purple” followed.74 In 1900, another specialist explained how to obtain prints of a variety of colors based on experiments he carried out “with a view of getting away from the cold black and white so much used.”75 By the turn of the century, not only was “black and white” used to describe a particular, neutral color scheme, this coloration was clearly now common. Aided by its practical qualities, the “black and white” bromide print had become ordinary, alongside numerous other papers and processing methods proposed by manufacturers and well received by the public. Before the invention of photography, black and white had been the traditional coloration of the printed, ink-on-paper, image.76 By 1900, it also firmly belonged to the realm of photography. Photographs with darks approaching neutral-black looked like engravings to the 1850s viewing public. Some found this beautiful while others preferred photographs that looked more like photographs, but the association of black with printing was widespread—as with Du Camp’s Oriental photographs printed by Blanquart-Évrard, discussed above. A half century later, the inky connotations of rich blacks in photography were still there, but they inspired less ambivalent reactions. An 1899 specialist described bromide prints as being “of an engraving black, somewhat resembling platinotypes.” He noted that their success reflected increasing acceptance of photographs that looked like engravings: “Indeed, it is a curious thing that, when platinotype was in its earlier days, the great fault that was found with it was that the prints did not look like ordinary photographs. A recent boast of gelatino-bromide printing is, that it gives results that cannot be distinguished from platinotype.”77

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Not only was black and white now one of the colors of photography, the viewing public had become accustomed to this coloration as photographic—even comparing one kind of black photograph to another. An additional influence on turn-of-the-century photographic aesthetics was the fact that photographs were now ubiquitous in print— in books and newspapers, on postcards, and even on plates in popular photography journals. This was black-and-white photography of another kind. It built solid bridges between photography and printing—between photography and black ink—that established the color “black and white” even more firmly as a part of photography in popular culture. An interest in “sepia” tones in the early twentieth century also reflected changing tastes in the color of photographs. After the First World War, most ordinary photographic prints were made in what was considered black and white, but “sepia” was a popular alternative coloration.78 For Sunday amateurs (more than for serious artists), it represented an artistic color.79 Sepia had already been artistically connoted in nineteenth-century photography, and now it was associated with traditional photographic processes, too. As one 1922 photographer presented it: “For general purposes this normal bromide tone [black and white] is most excellent, and to some tastes is all that is artistically desired […], but there seems to be desire among pictorialists for sepias, browns, and similar tones.”80 Manufacturers catered to demand by providing various processes for making or toning prints in what they called “sepia.” Kodak’s Velox paper, for example, could be “redeveloped” to obtain “sepia” tones, appropriate for giving “greater artistic values” to “landscapes, autumn scenes, and portraits.”81 In the 1920s, “sepia” was commonly used to describe a warm coloration proposed alongside black and white or strongly colored novelty options. A 1922 account of evolving tastes in print color is worth citing at length: “The softness and beauty of the platinum print attracted at once the artistic worker upon its introduction, and it eventually retired albumen as a medium for pictorial photography. The beautiful, luminous shadows and the modulated high-lights [sic] it afforded, when a good negative was used, gave impulse to reproduction in black and white. Bromide paper was introduced a little later and the good blacks it gave […] further influenced the taste […]. Then came the predilection for sepia tones; and both media catered to the dominant taste.”82 This overview is very schematic, but it reflects how “black and white” was gradually embraced and how, in contrast to it, “sepia” was becoming a tonal category in contemporary photography and not a nuance of brown among others, as in the era before industrial paper. It was a shift in vocabulary that would set the stage for “sepia” later becoming, in the mid-twentieth century, a generic term for describing nineteenthcentury photographs.83

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Sepia was different from black and white, but there were also different kinds of black and white, manifested in varying contrasts and print surfaces or textures. General shifts in contrast preference, especially, are important for understanding the symbolic dimension of white and of black in photography and the longevity of the composite term “black and white” for describing monochrome photography. What was being expressed when photographs were called “black-and-white” was an absence of any particular color tinge. The photographs in figure 8, for example, with their soft blacks and subdued whites (and modernist compositional devices), look very different from the five prints on the bottom right in figure 9, with their crisp highlights

8: Compositions by amateur photographer Guy Geoffroy, late 1940s, Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône.

and even crisper border. Both can be described—and when made would have been described—as being in black and white. In general, contrast tended to be lower earlier in the century, with tones ranging from dark grey to cream or white, whereas after World War II it was common to make bromide prints with a tonal range extending from dark black to bright white. An example of these changing conventions can be found in the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who made softer-toned grayer images in the 1930s and 1940s then rejected this look for stronger contrasts in the 1950s and 1960s.84 From early in the century, an increasing variety of papers had been marketed to allow photographers working in “black and white” to choose between different surface sheens, “grades” of contrast, weights, and even textures of paper. In the interwar period, photographers increasingly explored the expressive potential of different types of black and white available to them. In the new, modernist artistic photography of the 1920s, there was a general shift to higher-contrast printing that was

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9: Page from a family album, 1958, Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône.

once the preserve of commercial photography; for some, this was accompanied by a preference for the glossy papers used in industrial photography, which accentuated both darks and lights.85 Edward Weston, for example, noted in his diary in April 1930: “I have finished, since starting to print on glossy paper, eighty-five prints […] so incomparably finer do they register on glossy paper. It is a joy like unto making a first print, to reprint negatives I was tired of. No other surface is now to be thought of. I can print much deeper than heretofore, with no fear of losing shadows, or muddying half tones by drying down: or I can use a more contrasty grade of paper, resulting in amazingly rich blacks yet retaining brilliant whites.”86 Modernist photographers of the interwar period embraced what were deemed photography’s specific qualities and rejected imitation of traditional arts. Contrast, like a

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related interest in sharpness and detail, was part of this shift. It made it possible to employ the full extent of photography’s rendering of light. Pictorialist photographers had readily explored deep black as a color and a symbol.87 Now, the innovative inclusion of brighter whites was placing more metaphorical weight on light. White was light, and photography was the “language of light.”88 Olivier Lugon argues that in modernist prints, luminosity “not only allowed but also embodied the new power of revelation—and practically of cultural renewal—being attributed to photography.”89 With the avant-garde endorsement of contrast, then its arrival in mainstream visual culture, “black and white” truly became a color of photography.

“Black and White” as Not-in-Color The shift in use of the term “black and white” from a color of photography to a way of referring to all of monochrome photography has surprisingly escaped critical attention. Historicizing this shift is of more than just anecdotal interest. The establishment of a generic term for monochrome photography and the choice of “black and white” to do so create a binary opposition between photographs that record color and those that do not. This reflects changes in the place of color photography in society as much as it does the shades of monochrome photography. Because the term “black and white” now commonly describes photography that is not “in color,” it seems logical to ask whether it acquired this meaning with the advent of color photography. It did, in a sense, but not immediately, indicating that more was at stake than just the existence of the technical possibility of photographically reproducing colors. The 1907 commercialization of the Autochrome plate—the first widely effective and accessible process for photographing color—appears to have had no significant influence on “black and white” being used in a generic sense.90 In the 1910s and 1920s, “black and white” was still primarily a way to describe the aspect of certain monochrome prints, in particular distinguishing them from prints with sepia tones. Significantly, terms used to describe color photography were also slightly different in the Autochrome era. What we now call color photography was often referred to as photography “in natural colors.” Photographs still apparently presented enough chromatic diversity that it may not have been entirely clear what sort of “color photography” one was referring to without the extra information “natural” provided. It had also been common since the beginning of photography to color prints manually. Photographing color was so exceptional compared to other practices that there truly wasn’t a need for a generic term to describe all the other photographic processes combined. “Black and white” really started being used metonymically for all of monochrome photography after the next color-photography landmark: commercialization of films

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like Kodachrome starting in 1935–1936. A 1937 book on photographing with the Leica camera, for example, was full of examples of older and newer uses of the term “black and white.”91 “Color cannot be rendered through black and white photography,” it declared, effectively comparing monochrome photography to a world in color but also to color photography. “Black and white” and “color” as different categories of photographic practice were juxtaposed several times in this book—as when protecting photographs with glass was recommended “not only for color transparencies, but also for any black and white pictures which are worth having,” or when the authors warned: “Color photography requires much more critically correct exposures than black-and-white work.” It clearly seemed natural now to refer to monochrome photography generically as being “in black and white.” Vocabulary choices in the mid-1930s thus reflected a new binary opposition being made between “color” and “black and white.” Multiple factors contributed to the generic categorization of all monochrome photography as “black and white” and its concurrent establishment as being opposed to “color.” Importantly, the tones of monochrome photography had already become predominantly “black and white,” in practice and in speech. Also, this shift would not have taken place if color photography weren’t perceived as a serious rival to monochrome photography. Sally Stein has masterfully argued that a dramatic increase in color’s desirability and a parallel “bifurcation” between color and monochrome photography were already underway in the late 1920s and early 1930s, before the invention of multilayer color film. This early use of color photography was motivated by a desire to advertise new products designed in a range of hues, and it was initially underpinned by technologies like the Finlay screen plate and one-shot color cameras.92 If the invention of color film consolidated the establishment of the reflexive categories “black and white” and “color” when previous processes hadn’t, it was because this process immediately appeared to be a more definitive way to photograph color. Even though photographers and cinematographers would adopt color film in a slow and fragmented manner, it seemed clear from the start that it was there to stay and destined to grow in importance: it was an intellectually elegant solution to color recording, compatible with traditional cameras, and provided a color image with unprecedented definition and continuity.93 The very visible, publicized arrival of color film also led to significant intermingling of older and newer forms of photography in discourse, whereas color photography had previously been relegated to special articles or chapters. New terms were a clear way of verbally marking the conceptual distinction between photography that registered color and the traditional kind. The fact that the term “black and white” was preferred to “monochrome,” and that “natural color” came to be called simply “color,” speaks eloquently of color photography’s cultural significance and of how monochrome photography was reformulated in opposition to it. The term “black and white” reflected, I believe, the tremendous

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importance of color photography in the mid-twentieth century better than the word “monochrome” did. The invention of film that facilitated the widespread use of recorded color in cinematography was a momentous event in 1930s photographic culture. It was considered part of the ongoing technological conquest of “perceptual realism,” or making looking at an image more like looking at the world around us. For contemporaries, increased perceptual realism was already strikingly manifest in the experience of movies (animated photography) and in the recent arrival of sound in these pictures.94 Use of the term “monochrome” to refer to the absence of the colors we perceive can already be found in the photographic literature in the 1850s—as illustrated by the quote that opens this text. But the word “monochrome” contained color: it literally meant having one color. “Black and white,” on the other hand, was colorless. That made it the ideal opposite of color. At the same time, the qualifier “natural” quickly became superfluous when referring to color photography: full color was implied by the binary opposition created with “black and white.” Michel Frizot has shown that there is a powerful and long-running propensity to conceive of photography in binary terms, as first elaborated in the idea of the negative and the positive then incarnated within the “black and white” image itself.95 The establishment of “black and white” as a generic term for monochrome photography was part of a binary opposition that consecrated color photography. In the 1950s, the polarity between black-and-white and color photography wasn’t just linguistic hyperbole. It was visually striking, as is evident from the page of the 1950s family album shown in figure 9. In the 1950s, photographs were in color or they were in black and white. This opposition was also integral to how photographers chose their products, from the most respected professional to the ordinary amateur. If the subject’s color interest was minimal, black-and-white was in order, but if it was essential to the significance of the subject at hand—as with Marcel and Jean-Pierre’s new cars in figure 9—then color film was becoming de rigueur. Nor is being precise about the vocabulary of photographic color purely semantic when one considers some of the questions now asked by historians regarding the social history of photographic representation and of technological innovation, including how photography represented (and was engineered to represent) the subtleties of different skin colors. From photography’s very beginnings, inventors sought to record the colors of the world with photography. A century later, the triumph of “black-and-white” photography—blatantly signifying “not in color”—had effectively organized photography into two categories. This aesthetic and linguistic turn affirmed both the enduring conceptual purity of photography in representing the world via light and shadow, and the triumphant and definitive mastery of recording color.

The Colors of Black-and-White Photography

Notes   1 “The Photographic Exhibition,” Journal of the Photographic Society of London 3, no. 50 (Janu­ ary 21, 1857): 193.   2 One contributing factor was the high cost, until very recently, of full-color reproduction in books. This made the accurate reproduction of monochrome images almost unthinkable in historical studies, discouraging transmission and analysis of the chromatic aspect of photography.   3 For visual examples, see Larry J. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).   4 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844), n.p. (“Introductory Remarks”).   5 Ibid.   6 Robert Hunt, A Manual of Photography, 4th ed. (London and Glasgow: Richard Griffin and Company, 1854), 84.   7 On toning, in John Hannavy, ed., Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography (New York: Routledge, 2008), see esp., Mike Ware, “Salted Paper Print,” 1237–1239; and John Hannavy, “Toning,” 1394–1395.   8 [Thomas Sutton], “On the Fading of Positives,” Photographic Notes 2, no. 36 (October 1, 1857):  362–364.   9 Ibid., 362. 10 For this and the examples that follow: T. Frederick Hardwich, A Manual of Photographic Chemistry (London: John Churchill, 1857), 127–128. 11 “Review of the Manchester Photographic Exhibition,” Journal of the Photographic Society 3, no. 42 (May 21, 1856): 54. 12 “Rapport sur l’exposition ouverte par la Société en 1857,” Bulletin de la Société française de photographie [hereafter BSFP] 3, no. 8–10 (August–October 1857): 274. All translations from French sources are my own. 13 Paul Périer, Compte-rendu de l’exposition universelle de 1855 (Paris: Mallet-Bachelier, 1855), 17–18, 22. 14 “Review,” (see note 11), 54. 15 Périer, Compte-rendu (see note 13), 23. 16 Humbert de Molard, “Exposition universelle de photographie à Bruxelles,” BSFP, t. 2, no. 10 (October 1856): 281. 17 “The Exhibition,” Journal of the Photographic Society of London 4, no. 66 (May 21, 1857): 210. 18 Périer, Compte-rendu (see note 13), 71. 19 An internet search for “timbre bistre” will display pictures of this 10-centime stamp, described as “bistre” in the 1850s. Bister was a “couleur d’un brun roussâtre” in P. Poitevin, Nouveau dictionnaire universel de la langue française (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1856). It was “a darkbrown pigment” in An American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853). For Le Gray, bister was situated in the color spectrum of photography between “black” and “sepia”—a dark brown heading towards yellow. See Gustave Le Gray, Nouveau traité théorique et pratique de photographie sur papier et sur verre (Paris: Lerebours et Secretan, 1851), 54. 20 Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851: Reports by the Juries; Presentation Copy (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1852), 279. 21 Francis Wey, “Des progrès et de l’avenir de la photographie,” La Lumière 1, no. 35 (October 5, 1851): 138.

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22 Henri de Lacretelle, “Beaux-arts. Revue photographique,” La Lumière 2, no. 10 (February 28, 1852): 37. 23 Another print of this photograph, in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, isn’t as intensely blue as the example reproduced here. My thanks to Serge Kakou for this observa­ tion, based on his comparison of the two originals. 24 See Sylvie Aubenas, “Unir la science et l’art,” in Gustave Le Gray, 1820–1884, ed. Sylvie Aubenas (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2002), 260. 25 Le Gray cited in Aubenas, “Unir la science et l’art,” (see note 24), 260. 26 Gustave Le Gray, “Procédés nouveaux, pour obtenir des épreuves positives sur papier d’une coloration très variée et d’une fixité plus complète que par les anciens procédés,” La Lumière 2, no. 8 (February 14, 1852): 31; and (for quotes) no. 9 (February 21, 1852): 35. 27 Charles Gaudin, “Visite à l’atelier de M. Le Gray,” La Lumière 3, no. 50 (December 10, 1853): 198. 28 For published examples, see the exhibition catalogs Aubenas, Gustave Le Gray (see note 24); and Anne de Mondenard and Marc Pagneux, Modernisme ou Modernité. Les photographes du cercle de Gustave Le Gray (Arles: Actes Sud, 2012). For more on the chemistries of Le Gray’s colors, see Lisa Barro and Nora W. Kennedy, “Gustave Le Gray’s Salted Paper Prints,” in ICOM Committee for Conservation Triennial Meeting The Hague (London: James & James, 2005), 533–540. 29 Aubenas, “Unir la science et l’art,” (see note 24), 260. 30 De Mondenard and Pagneux, Modernisme ou Modernité (see note 28), 204–205. On Le Gray’s students, see also Aubenas, Gustave Le Gray (see note 24), 28–29, 34–40. 31 M. A. Gaudin, “Imprimerie photographique” La Lumière 3, no. 4 (January 22, 1853): 13. 32 Louis Désiré Blanquart-Évrard, “Procédés employés pour obtenir les épreuves de photographie sur papier,” Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences 24, no. 4 (January 25, 1847): 122. 33 See Isabelle Jammes, Blanquart-Évrard et les origines de l’édition photographique française (Genève et Paris: Librairie Droz, 1981), 39–49. The same year Blanquart-Évrard published his Traité de photographie sur papier (Paris: Roret, 1851). 34 “Tirage des positifs par développement par M. Blanquart-Évrard,” BSFP 8 (August 1862): 203. See also Alan Greene, “Les épreuves salées par développement (1843–1866),” Études photographiques, no. 14 (January 2004): 130–143. 35 Anne McCauley, “The Photographic Adventure of Maxime Du Camp,” in Perspectives on Photography, ed. Dave Oliphant and Thomas Zigal (Austin: University of Texas, 1982), 49. 36 “Exhibition of photographic pictures at the Society of Arts,” The Athenaeum, no. 1314 (January 1, 1853): 23. 37 Reports by the Juries, 279. 38 Thomas Sutton, The Calotype Process: A Hand Book to Photography on Paper (London: Joseph Cundall, 1855): 67. For Sutton’s praise of Blanquart-Évrard, see also “Sir William Newton’s Letter in the Last No. of the London Photographic Journal,” Photographic Notes 2, no. 23 (March 15, 1857): 103–104. 39 “Tirage des positifs par développement par M. Blanquart-Évrard,” BSFP (1862). On the partnership: Jammes, Blanquart-Évrard (see note 33), 113; and Jean-Claude Gautrand, BlanquartÉvrard (Douchy-les-Mines: Centre Régional de la Photographie Nord Pas-de-Calais, 1999), 44. 40 Ibid., 207. 41 Francis Wey, “Comment le soleil est devenu peintre: Histoire du daguerréotype et de la photographie,” Le Musée des familles 20 (July 20, 1853): 294. 42 Ware, “Salted Paper Print,” in Hannavy, Encyclopedia (see note 7), 1237–1239. 43 Philip H. Delamotte, Photography: A Manual for Students and Amateurs (New York: Office of the Photographic and Fine Art Journal, 1854), 22.

The Colors of Black-and-White Photography

44 Charles A. Long, Practical Photography on Glass and Paper (London: Bland and Long, 1854), 47. Blanquart-Évrard only occasionally gold-toned, according to Sutton (“Tirage des positifs par développement par M. Blanquart-Évrard,” (see note 39), 207). 45 Wey, “Comment le soleil est devenu peintre,” (see note 41), 293–294. 46 Périer, Compte-rendu (see note 13), 6. 47 On drawing versus color, see Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), see esp. 28–29, 53–54. On how photography critics participated in this discussion, see also André Jammes and Eugenia Parry Janis, The Art of French Calotype (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 96–101; and on the notion of “colorist” in photography see Henri Zemer, “Gustave Le Gray, artiste héliographe,” in Gustave Le Gray, 1820–1884, ed. Sylvie Aubenas (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2002), 209–231. 48 For example: Francis Wey, “Théorie du portrait,” La Lumière 1, no. 12 (April 27, 1851): 46-47; and Charles Bauchal, “Soirée photographique,” La Lumière 2, no. 23 (May 29, 1852): 90–91. 49 On Nègre see Bauchal, “Soirée photographique,” (see note 48), 90. On Clifford see Ernest Lacan, “Exposition photographique de Bruxelles,” La Lumière 6, no. 42 (October 18, 1856): 161. The idea that a monochrome art could render color predated photography. Painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries instructed engravers copying their work to represent color correctly. See Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 119–123. 50 Ernest Lacan, “Revue photographique,” La Lumière 7, no. 34 (August 22, 1857): 133. 51 “Rapport sur l’exposition ouverte par la Société en 1857,” BSFP 3, no. 8–10 (August– October 1857): 264. 52 For “mouse color,” see Hunt, A Manual (see note 6), 84. For “dead-leaf,” see Le Gray, Nouveau traité (see note 19), 54. For “rusty,” see [Sutton], “On Positive Printing without a ToningBath,” Photographic Notes 1, no. 15 (November 15, 1856), 242. For “brick,” see Hunt, A Manual (see note 6), 84; [Sutton], “On the Fading of Positives,” (see note 8), 362; Hardwich, A Manual of Photographic Chemistry (see note 10), 128. For “iron brown,” see Hunt, A Manual, 87. For “steel blue,” see Hunt, A Manual, 84. For “mulberry,” see Hardwich, A Manual of Photographic Chemis­ try, 127. For “chocolate,” see Hardwich, A Manual of Photographic Chemistry, 128, 132, 152, 253, 262. For “licorice,” see Wey, “Des progrès et de l’avenir,” (see note 21), 138. For “olive,” see Hunt, A Manual, 85; and “On An Improved Process of Printing by Development, Without a Toning-Bath,” Photographic Notes 3, no. 42 (January 1, 1858): 11. For “creamy,” see Sutton, “On Positive Printing,” 237. 53 “Exhibition of photographic pictures at the Society of Arts,” (see note 36), 23. 54 Hunt, A Manual (see note 6), 211. 55 [Thomas Sutton], “The Collodion Process”, Photographic Notes 1, no. 7 (June 17, 1856): 86. 56 On the history of sepia in the arts, see Jean-Pierre Montier, “Sépia, couleur de l’encre, teinte du temps,” Polysèmes, no. 14 (2015), http://polysemes.revues.org/570. Accessed January 21, 2019. 57 Blanquart-Évrard, Traité (see note 33), xxxi–xxxii, 130–132. 58 Ibid., 134. 59 Advertisement for “Imprimerie photographique,” La Lumière 1, no. 34 (September 28, 1851): 136. 60 Sutton, The Calotype Process (see note 38), vi. 61 Périer, Compte-rendu (see note 13), 7. 62 On these two types of paper, see Hope Kingsley, “Bromide Print” and “Gelatine Silver Print,” in Hannavy, Encyclopedia (see note 7), 218–219 and 573–575.

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63 Bertrand Lavédrine, (Re)connaître et conserver les photographies anciennes (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2007), 150, 153; and Kingsley, “Bromide Print,” (see note 62), 219. For an example of sepia toning, see Brian Coe and Mark Haworth-Booth, A Guide to Early Photographic Processes (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983), 72–73. 64 Kingsley, “Bromide Print,” (see note 62), 574; and Coe and Haworth-Booth, A Guide to Early Photographic Processes (see note 63), 62–71. 65 For example, E. J. Wall, A Dictionary of Photography for the Professional and Amateur Photographer (New York: The Scovill and Adams Company, 1889), 137–139. See also Mike Ware, “Platinotype Company” and “Platinum Print,” in Hannavy, Encyclopedia (see note 7), 1134–1137; and Coe and Haworth-Booth, A Guide to Early Photographic Processes (see note 63), 80–83. 66 See for example Wall, A Dictionary (see note 65), 26; and Appareils, accessoires et fournitures pour la photographie (Paris: E. Mazo, 1905), 80. 67 For example, see Sylvain Morand, “Imagination and Pigment: Archaism and Technique in Pictorialism,” in Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe, 1888–1918, ed. Phillip Prodger et al. (Rennes: Le Point du Jour, 2005), 251–268. 68 “The Photographic Salon,” The British Journal of Photography 46, no. 2056 (September 29, 1899): 615. 69 Observation based on full-text searches in The American Amateur Photographer for the years 1889–1891. The present study was in part made possible by the recent possibility of search­ ing a large number of books and photography journals to test hypotheses and establish a chronology of the usage of particular terms. 70 “Home Portraiture,” The British Journal of Photography 46, no. 2027 (March 10, 1899): 151. 71 E. Sanger Shepherd, “The Photography of Colour,” The British Journal of Photography 46, no. 2054 (September 15, 1899): 583. 72 Kingsley, “Gelatine Silver Print,” (see note 62), 574; and Mike Ware, “The Eighth Metal: The Rise of the Platinotype Process,” first published in Photography 1900: The Edinburgh Symposium (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 1993), http://www.mikeware.co.uk/mikeware/ Eighth_Metal.html. Accessed January 21, 2019. 73 J. Eaton Fearn, Modern Photography for Amateurs (London: L. Upcott Gill, 1896), 77. 74 J. Brown, “On the Production of Warm Tones on Bromide Paper,” The British Journal of Photography 46, no. 2021 (January 27, 1899): 57. 75 Ulysses G. Ore, “Photographs in Color,” Photographic Times 46 (March 1900): 120. 76 On what he terms the “revolution” of black-and-white imagery in the mid-fifteenth to early sixteenth century see, Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (see note 49), 119. 77 W. K. Burton, Burton’s Modern Photography, 12th rev. ed. (London: Carter and Co., 1899), 167. 78 This predominance of a black-and-white coloration is evident from observation of a wide range of photographic collections. One example from scholarly literature provides an elegant confirmation: When editing his voluminous A New History of Photography (Cologne: Könemann, 1998; first published in English in 1994), Michel Frizot chose to mirror aesthetic changes in the dominant coloration of photography by reproducing photographic prints essentially in warm duo-tone colors in the first part of the book then switching to entirely black and white reproductions after the First World War and chapters on Atget and color photography. 79 Michel Frizot, “Et inversement: le négatif et le noir et blanc,” Trafic, no. 40 (2001): 79. 80 “Toning Bromides with Copper Bromo-Iodide,” The Photographic Journal of America, vol. 59 (1922): 326. 81 Eastman Kodak, How to Make Good Pictures: A Book for the Amateur Photographer (Rochester: Kodak, 1928), 132.

The Colors of Black-and-White Photography

82 “The Tone of the Photograph,” The Photographic Journal of America, 59 (1922): 346. 83 Based on literary references, Jean-Pierre Montier argues that the association between “sepia” and nineteenth-century photography emerged in the mid-1930s, becoming progressively more frequent after the Second World War (“Sépia” [see note 56], 6–7). For another engaging essay on more recent connotations of sepia, see Luc Sante, “Sepia,” Cabinet Maga­ zine 14 (Summer 2004): 7–10. 84 Michel Frizot, “D’imprévisibles regards: les leçons de photographie d’un Scrapbook,” in Henri Cartier-Bresson Scrapbook: photographies 1932–1946, ed. Frizot et al. (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006), 31–33. 85 See Olivier Lugon, Le style documentaire: d’August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920–1945 (Paris: Macula, 2001), 70–71, 126–127. 86 Edward Weston, “Daybooks, 1923–1930: An Excerpt,” in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 312–313. 87 Michel Frizot suggests that the Pictorialists’s interest in black was tied both to imitation of prints and to appreciation of “the effects of negativization, as in X-rays or [views of] nocturnal lights” (“Et inversement,” [see note 79]). 88 The term “language of light” was used by László Moholy-Nagy in 1927 in “Photography in Advertising,” reprinted in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Aper­ ture, 1989), 89. 89 Lugon, Le style documentaire (see note 85), 122–126, see esp. 126. 90 The observations in this section are based on my sampling of a selection of American and English photographic journals and manuals accessible for full-text searches on https://archive.org/ and https://www.hathitrust.org/. 91 Willard D. Morgan and Henry M. Lester, eds., The Leica Manual: A Manual for the Amateur and Professional Covering the Entire Field of Leica Photography (New York: Morgan and Lester, 1937), 84, 253, 265 for examples cited in what follows. 92 Sally Ann Stein, “The Rhetoric of the Colorful and the Colorless: American Photography and Material Culture between the Wars” (PhD Dissertation: Yale University, 1991), see esp. 165– 168. Stein further analyzes how “The advent of color photography, far from outmoding the tradition of black and white, provoked a vital reassessment of that tradition, and a dynamic reinvestigation of its contemporary uses and meanings,” (204). 93 Color film appears, at first, to have created more enthusiasm amongst photographers and amateur cinematographers than in the feature-film industry, where the Technicolor system was established and provided films with better image quality that were easier to copy. See Richard Misek, Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 186, n5. 94 Kim Timby, 3D and Animated Lenticular Photography: Between Utopia and Entertainment (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 126–131; and Kim Timby, “Photography, Cinema, and Perceptual Realism in the Nineteenth Century,” in Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century: Towards an Integrated History, ed. Simone Natale and Nicoletta Leonardi (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2018). 95 Frizot, “Et inversement,” (see note 79), 71–81.

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Raymond Meier

The Art & Technique of Commissioned Photography

3999-06 Cubes #01, 2009, pigment print, image size 34.29 × 45.72 cm, paper size 43.18 × 55.88 cm, digital capture, made with a view camera with an 80MP digital back.

3999-09 Cubes #02, 2009, pigment print, image size 34.29 × 45.72 cm, paper size 43.18 × 55.88 cm, digital capture, made with a view camera with an 80MP digital back.

4167-08 Rubber #12, 2010, pigment print, image size 34.29 × 45.72 cm, paper size 55.88 × 43.18 cm, digital capture, made with a view camera with an 80MP digital back.

4167-02 Plexi #07, 2010, pigment print, image size 34.29 × 45.72 cm, paper size 55.88 × 43.18 cm, digital capture, made with a view camera with an 80MP digital back.

4167-01 Plexi #08, 2010, pigment print, image size 34.29 × 45.72 cm, paper size 55.88 × 43.18 cm, digital capture, made with a view camera with an 80MP digital back.

4167-05 Plexi #09, 2010, pigment print, image size 34.29 × 45.72 cm, paper size 55.88 × 43.18 cm, digital capture, made with a view camera with an 80MP digital back.

4167-06 Rubber #10, 2010, pigment print, image size 34.29 × 45.72 cm, paper size 55.88 × 43.18 cm, digital capture, made with a view camera with an 80MP digital back.

3999-11 Rubber #04, 2010, pigment print, image size 34.29 × 45.72 cm, paper size 43.18 × 55.88 cm, digital capture, made with a view camera with an 80MP digital back.

4586-01 Lemon Juice #01, 2012, pigment print, image size 34.29 × 45.72 cm, paper size 43.18 × 55.88 cm, digital capture, made with a view camera with an 80MP digital back.

4586-06 Lemon Juice #06, 2012, pigment print, image size 34.29 × 45.72 cm, paper size 43.18 × 55.88 cm, digital capture, made with a view camera with an 80MP digital back.

Estée Lauder advertisement, 1997, composite digital file, shot on multiple 10.16 × 12.7 cm color negative film sheets.

Charles Jourdan advertisement, 1991, c-print, 22.86 × 30.48 cm, with hand-cut masking technique, shot on 10.16 × 12.7 cm color negative film.

The New York Times Magazine, 1990, c-print, 22.86 × 30.48 cm, with hand-cut masking technique, shot on 10.16 × 12.7 cm color negative film.

Calvin Klein advertisement, 1993, Fuji Pictro Proof print, 21.59 × 29.21 cm, with digital flashing technique, shot on 10.16 × 12.7 cm color negative film.

W magazine, 1995, Fuji Pictro Proof print, 21.59 × 29.21 cm with digital masking and layering techniques, shot on 10.16 × 12.7 cm color negative film.

Harper’s Bazaar magazine, 1996, Fuji Pictro Proof print, 21.59 × 29.21 cm, with digital masking and screening techniques, shot on 10.16 × 12.7 cm color negative film.

Harper’s Bazaar magazine, 1995, Fuji Pictro Proof print, 21.59 × 29.21 cm, with digital masking and negative reversal techniques, shot on 10.16 × 12.7 cm color negative film.

W magazine, 1996, Fuji Pictro Proof print, 21.59 × 29.21 cm, with digital assemblage techniques, shot on multiple 10.16 × 12.7 cm color negative film sheets.

Color s

Charlotte Cotton

An interview with Raymond Meier

Raymond Meier is a photographer whose creative practice is underpinned by a deep understanding of the medium’s techniques and processes. He has been a photographic innovator who has developed the chromatic aesthetics of the medium, led the way in the application of new and revised technological photographic processes, and has established high benchmarks for mass-media image-making. Born in Switzerland in 1957, his fascination with the technical and creative possibilities of photography began in childhood, and he constructed his first darkroom aged twelve. Meier undertook an apprenticeship at the Zurich Art School in 1972 and, at the age of twenty, he opened his first studio in Zurich. In 1986, after ten years of honing his experimental processes and elegantly precise photographic style, he moved his studio to New York City. Over the past four decades, Raymond Meier has been a consistent influencer upon the visual direction of publications including American Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New York Times Style Magazine, at points of radical change within their respective publishing stories. During the mid-to-late 1980s, Meier was at the forefront of the movement of editorial and advertising photography towards complex darkroom-based color image-making. Up until the late 1980s, black and white photography was still the reprographic industry’s mainstay, with color images captured on color slide film (“Chromes”). The arrival of a new work flow for color photography, forwarded by image-maker Nick Knight in the UK and then Meier in the US, called for elaborate experimentation in the analog darkroom and the creation of C-type color prints as part of the reprographic process for printed magazines and advertising. Meier was also a crucial figure in the early adoption of digital post-production software in the early 1990s and set precedents for the arrival of an almost entirely digital landscape for fashion and beauty image-making in the 21st century. He has spent the first fifteen years of his over-forty-year creative career absorbed in stretching of the capacities of analog color photography, and the subsequent over-twenty-five years in constant experimentation with the properties of digital photography. The photographic portfolios that book-end this interview mark the span of Meier’s color

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­ hotography: A portfolio of editorial and advertising images from 1990–1997, begins p with analog darkroom techniques, and moves into a selection of his earliest hybridi­ zation of analog color film capture with digital manipulation that pushed commercial color reprographics into its first creatively-led digital iterations. The second portfolio concentrates on Meier’s independent photographic projects made since 2009, using digital photographic capture and rendered as pigment prints, with reductive and subtle color palettes that speak to the legacy and creative relevance of “analog thinking” in the digital photographic field. Raymond Meier: I think we should start by saying that it is such an amazing thing to be talking on the topic of color photography. Charlotte Cotton: I suspect this is your fantasy photography conversation… RM: Every photographer dreams about reaching a version of color photography that has true fidelity to their vision. We have our vision of what color can be and then have to deal with how to technically and practically reach this. You don’t fully find your color palette until you see it emerge in the process. Ahead of that, you are anticipating it, dreaming it. CC: You were instrumental in shifting the workflow of image reprographics for magazine printing in the mid-to-late 1980s. This was a really important moment in the story of color photography, when innovative photographers opened the door for more ambitious, subjective and experimental visions in color. Specifically, you were one of the first photographers to push for a movement away from “chrome” color transparencies [slide film] as the industry-standard for color imagery and the dominance of black-and-white photography on the pages of printed magazines. You were part of the very small group of photographic innovators who moved photography’s creative industries towards making color prints—C-prints—which allowed for much greater control of and spectrum for the color of photographic images. RM: I remember seeing Nick Knight’s images for the Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto in about 1986, and I could not believe that this was somehow possible. These were photographs that I had not seen before. We have to give Nick Knight the credit that he initiated this important shift from color slide film to photographic prints because nobody else was coming even close to breaking the boundaries of color photography at this time. For me in New York, I could not achieve the results I wanted by staying within the conventional boundaries of color photography—working with color slide film—because of the unsurmountable restrictions of the process. Adopting a process of creating C-type photographic prints promised a way to get the colors that

An interview with Raymond Meier

I was truly aiming for because the work was done in the darkroom, and it was the process where I was controlling every step of the darkroom journey and defining the color palette. CC: How did you convince the magazines and the repro houses back in the mid-1980s to accept the print as the form of your delivery of the image? RM: I remember when I started to use color negatives and started to make C-prints, I had a tiny wet darkroom at the time, with everything done by hand. I made my first C-print, I loved it, I packed it up and sent it to the magazine and within ten minutes of the editor receiving it, I get a phone call, “Oh Raymond, thank you so much for this beautiful print. We just love it. When do we get the chrome?” and I had to say, “I’m sorry, you are not getting a chrome anymore.” The chrome was the standard of the industry. And you also have to keep in mind that the repro-houses were set up with large drum scanners, that could fit maybe 50 chromes on one drum. And now this photographer comes with this lovely 16 × 20 inch print and the scanner couldn’t accommodate any other images on the same drum cycle. The C-print made the repro-houses’ work so much more complicated and they weren’t immediately equipped to do this. Their workflow with photographic prints centered on black-and-white prints. They would use a film “repro” camera to photograph the print and create a monochrome transparency ready for scanning. This process just wasn’t calibrated or refined enough to work for color C-type prints. You have to imagine that if someone breaks the workflow in this huge industry, there is going to be a real pushback. But within six months to a year of my persisting with delivering color prints, many fashion and beauty photographers in the US had started to adopt the C-print process and demand a shift. The reprographics industry had to change their workflow and accommodate this new reality. CC:  What did you make with this radical new color workflow? RM: I was the kind of photographer who used color as a way to be experimental­—to do things in the darkroom with masking and silhouetting, and multiple exposures. Nobody really knew how anyone else made their version of experimental color at that time—I don’t think we were secretive but things moved at such a fast pace that there was no time for a dialog. Something was cool one day and then you had moved on by the next. Quite a number of photographers’ way into color experimentation in the late 1980s was through developing transparency (slide) film in negative developer—in opposition to darkroom standard conventions—and you had a rebirth of what was called “cross processing,” which could create extraordinary colors ranging from delicate pastels to almost psychedelic, bright hues. The reward was that you could create

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new color palettes. This is probably one of the most fascinating things about photography—to create something that neither you nor anyone else had ever seen. It was fun to do all of these forbidden things and not to follow the rules, and it was a time that photographers’ breakthroughs were immediately picked up by magazines, and permeated through visual culture. CC: Earlier, you used the word “fidelity” to describe the quality of color that photographers aspire to. In the context of the creative industry that you have navigated and undeniably shaped, I wonder what color fidelity means to you. I think that your idea of “fidelity” of color is routed in a journey of personal experimentation but I imagine it is also grounded in the context of popular taste and the directions taken by magazine’s editorial teams. RM:  What is the motor in photographic production? Everybody—photographers, art directors, editors—wants to push photography to the next level because we are unhappy with the current state of play. Otherwise, why would we push? For someone who makes images, so many things can go wrong by definition. It could be as stupid as forgetting to put film in your camera, or the lab loses your film, or something goes wrong with the processing, or the camera malfunctions. The list of what can go wrong with photography is endless. People always look for different things and perhaps you could say that through photography’s history, makers have wrestled with color photography because black and white wasn’t enough. Thirty years ago, we wanted newspapers to show us color images and even if those colors were wrong and ugly, it was more important for us to see in color than for the images to be beautiful. By the late 1980s, editorial and advertising photography had reached a stage where people wanted to be surprised, photographers wanted to surprise audiences and clients, and visual culture was ready for this. It didn’t have to be good, it just had to be different. When you see something for the first time—as with all things—it has an incredible power. CC:  Where does this desire to push beyond the conventions of color first happen in earnest for you? RM: I think it was always there for me. You have to remember that when I started in the 1970s, we photographed things on chromes—they came back from the lab, they had a color cast, you had to re-shoot, you had to put a filter into the camera, the color was shifting, the color wasn’t right, you were frustrated that maybe the greens were dull and dirty so you were wishing there were better greens. Over forty years later and in our digital creative space, the greens look fantastic. But you know what? Today, I prefer my ugly greens from the 1970s. If I think about the past forty years, I think of

An interview with Raymond Meier

all of the processes and technical advances from chromes, to color negatives, to the colors of Fujiflex, to the colors of Agfa… the list goes on. Each time I tried a new material, at first I loved it and by the end I hated it and the next material came out and I thought that all my problems would be solved and they never were. In the middle of those forty years there was the digital transformation—I truly hoped that scanning and digital manipulation would resolve everything because I could, say, make my greens lighter and the skin darker with the kind of ease that I have never experienced with analog photography. At the beginning of digital processes, we thought all the problems with color photography were solved forever. Now, we realize that nothing got solved—we are permanently trading one thing for another thing and we are actually not really advancing. If you look at color sixty years ago—at Kodachrome film— the colors were so “wrong,” you can’t make it more wrong. But they are so beautiful. People start to miss it, suddenly we realize the beauty we have lost. CC: I want to save up talking about the 21st century and what got lost in the rise of digital capture. But you were one of the very early adopters of digital post-production—of Photoshop and its precursors Paintbox—in the early 1990s. RM: I think I can take the credit for introducing the digital work flow into the ­creative industry in the US from late 1991. I was still shooting on film but no longer making a C-print for reproduction. Instead, I was scanning the film and manipulating the colors with software. The moment I realized the power of digital manipulation, I shut down my color darkroom. I think about digital photography as carrying the same experimental capacity as analog processes but just with profoundly more possibilities. The moment that you introduced a computer into the work flow, there were no more boundaries—you just had to make your wish and it would happen. It wasn’t for a few years that I think we realized that, yet again, we had traded something valuable against these new image technologies. At the time, it didn’t matter. I think I was aware of what I was about to lose but I cared most about what I was about to gain because that was the exciting part. Now, almost thirty years later, I’m saddened by all the things I lost in analog color photography. CC: I see the arc of color photography’s narrative a little differently in the sense that I think what you and the other experimenters such as Nick Knight achieved in the 1980s was to take analog color photography to its limits. One of the characteristics of these complex processing and darkroom practices was their “proto-digital” quality. In particular, I think of this in relation to your use of masks that meant that you could expose one area of an image and construct its coloration without any material shifts on any other part of the image. That is, for me, the creative bridge that was made between analog experimentation and the infinite possibilities of digital photo-

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graphic manipulation and control. That said, there was still something within the analog processes that you were using until 1991 that was the antithesis of digital image-making as we know it now—namely, that analog color photography can be built up in a complex way but is inherently consequential. The cumulative order of the steps in an analog process have meaning and affect, and you start again each time that you set out on the journey of making a print. Perhaps digital image-making sacrifices the soulfulness of analog color processes for an algorithmically-generated spectrum. RM:  With analog photography, you are working with materials with inherent beauty. The imprecision—even the mistakes—in the analog color processes have an organic beauty and we used them in unexpected ways in the 1980s. Even when you set out with a very clear intention, the factor of the unknown is built into analog color photography. As a print rolls out of the machine, there is always an element of surprise, and you are never able to repeat the same print again. These tolerances or “mistakes” add to the quality and beauty of color photography. Absolute perfection is deathly and in digital photography we have millions of ways to reach a perfect chromatic plateau, but the chance that you will not find the optimum way is almost guaranteed. I don’t perceive digital photography as the problem but I think we underestimate its complexity. CC:  Would you hazard a guess about whether it is easier or more difficult to use digital imaging to create color in comparison to analog color photography? RM: I would say that they are very similar, I think they both take a lifetime to master. If I hear young photographers talking about how much they love analog photography, I wonder whether they gave up too early in trying to work with digital processes. In a way, of course, I understand the contemporary fascination with analog color photography, which has been reborn in a reduced and niche way in the 2010s. The chance is that something beautiful will be rendered with analog materials is substantial. Technically-speaking, the post-production and image capture of digital photography make photography ostensibly “better” than ever but I think we lost the possibilities of the shortcomings we had to work with in analog color photography. CC:  What is the difference between the way in which digital and analog processes capture color? RM: Digital capture is precise, analog has imprecision. Analog film outlines the captured subject—it responds to the sculptural forms in front of the lens in a material way because each color and its density is held in the minutely differentiated layers of

An interview with Raymond Meier

an analog film. It creates a 3-dimensionality and amplifies color by being merged with texture and depth in a way that is unique to analog capture on film. A brown jacket is as much about the folds and the texture as its color—and the color is inaccurate on film! Digital capture scans every detail of the scene and flattens everything into pixels, and it shows the brown jacket in its true color and detail. It’s correct but unspectacular and without that specificity of analog imprecision. I actually prefer now to work with digital capture and start with the “correct” color and be in control of every decision that can make this brown jacket rich and tangible, and beautiful in my way of perceiving it. I have an understanding that many people hate the seemingly boring and flat photographic capture of digital photography but I prefer to work with this over the expectation that color film will do the work or the digital screen will inevitably make the color of an image “pop”. CC: Given that digital photography can present practically any color, do you think that a new version of color—a new “fidelity” to quote you—is at play? RM: I don’t think we have creatively reached that point yet, we are still in a phase of referencing photography’s analog past. I don’t even know what to think about this. In the digital age, we can only reference analog color palettes and as history moves forward, these are the only palettes we have. From carbon prints to color negatives and C-prints… it’s such a short period of time. Are these really the only references for the rest of time? For me this is actually a deep crisis in photography, you can digitally simulate this relatively short history of color photography, but how sad that we are so preoccupied with re-referencing. CC: How do you deal with that in your own practice? RM: I think my two Cubes works, where I studied the color palettes of Morandi’s still life paintings, were very much prompted by my frustration with color photography. I just wasn’t going to accept that I like the colors in paintings better than those in photography. I found a few answers but not all the answers I seek by far. I see no reason why I shouldn’t get the same aesthetic pleasure out of a color photograph as a painting, I see no reason why we can’t push color photography in its digital form in experimental ways. I don’t think we progressed so much in the course of color photography, and we adapt to the new industrial standards. I think we lost a lot and perhaps have started to know what we are missing, and I just hope that many of us will not settle for this. Color photography is too important and too interesting. New York City, January 2019

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The Invention of BlacK-AND-White Photography: Proclamations of Photography’s Aesthetic Independence and the History of PHOTOGRAPHY’S COLORS

“‘Dad, how come old photographs are in black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?’ ‘Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just the world was in black and white then.’”1 Calvin and Hobbes “Credibility is better in black and white.”2 Hiroshi Sugimoto “Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the ­alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.”3 Robert Frank These three quotes convey some of the idealized beliefs and metaphorical tropes surrounding the use of black and white and color in photography that persist to this day. There is no doubt that the aesthetic autonomy of photography has chafed against the complex question of the use of color, sometimes becoming worn down in the process, in order to maintain—at all costs—the distinction between the (chromatic) mass medium and the (black-and-white) art form. The renewed engagement with color and photography occasioned by the transition from analog to digital photography demonstrated, however, that despite vehement post-hoc assertions to the contrary, these categories were not historically always radically separated from one another. The fact remains, however, that even though, as Sally A. Stein has shown, the patriotic photographic output of the FSA—to take one example—existed in color, these images were not published.4 From a research perspective it is instructive to ask why this simultaneity occurred between black-and-white and color photography, and which political decisions led to an image being either published or forgotten. As of writing, research in this vein since 2000 has primarily confined itself to the re-discovery of color photo archives, such as color photographs taken during the First World War.5 Alongside this research in the fields of art history and the history of photography,

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contemporary photographers’ appropriative recourse to early photography, with its diverse array of hues, is invaluable in providing a new perspective on images which, prior to the digital age, were generally only rendered in black and white. These blackand-white reproductions of early photographs make them seem as if they were downright ancient relics in the history of the technically mediated image. In contrast, the bright hues of these images now come across as surprisingly fresh, original, and charming. A significant outcome of the digitization and publication of entire collections has been a growing awareness among the general of the chromatic palette available to early photography prior to the invention of color photography. The enthusiasm provoked by the delicate hues and the often fragile material objects of early photography is one of the more positive byproducts of the much-maligned digital era. Perhaps our experience of the digital image will even lead to a revision of the history of the use of color in photography as a whole. This essay is intended to be a contribution to such efforts. There are four core statements that substantiate and give shape to “the colors of photography,” this book’s unifying theme: One: The chronological and apparently linear version of color photography’s developmental history is but one particular narrative form with which to describe the use of color in photography. Two: The underlying methodological concept that underpins the pre-existing narrative of color photography is inadequate and questionable—especially with regards to how the histories of color photography and black-and-white photography are recounted in parallel to one another, that is as existing primarily independently of one another. Three: This two-track construction is based on identity-constituting and rhetorically manifested assertions concerning the “essence” of photography as residing within the system of the modern arts whose influence was felt internationally, while also being shaped by subjective preferences. There was considerable mutual resentment on both sides, primarily on a theoretical level: black and white had long been considered the only conceivable—supposedly achromatic—color scheme for artistic photography of the modern era, while color photography only began to catch on in the international art scene around 1960. Four: Setting aside technical constraints, color photography and black-and-white photography have often undergone similar developments that are connected with one another, despite the fact that they occurred at different times in the medium’s history. Depicting the history of color photography as a chronological succession of innovations carried out by inventive individual men or viewing it as simply part of a broader history of technology and the economy leads, as mentioned above, to a narrow con-

The Invention of BLACK-AND-WHITE Photography

ception of the use of color in photography that excludes numerous other narrative strands. The notion of the “colors of photography” goes beyond the two-track history of color and black-and-white photography, opening up new avenues for research on the history and theory of color and especially the hues, materials, and discourses bound up with the visual medium of photography. The following essay will examine works stemming from the nineteenth century right up to the present day that exemplify this complicating of the use of color in photography.

The “first” photograph: Nicéphore Niépce In order to provide a basic orientation regarding the history of color photography, it is worth mentioning a few key facts and important events which are considered canonical in the narrative provided by previous research. In 1861, physicist James Clerk Maxwell presented a color image of a tartan ribbon that he had created via an additive process (fig. 1). Maxwell’s experiments were based on the trichromatic color theory of Thomas Young, which, unlike Newton’s corpuscular theory of light, had demonstrated light’s wave-like quality. It is thanks to Young that the focus of research shifted to the theory of color perception over theories centered around particles and matter. Color was thenceforth understood as a psychological, physiological, and optical quantity. It was not until the advent of autochrome process developed by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1904 that color photography was able to achieve widespread use and prevalence. Figure 3 shows one of the brothers crocheting a light pink collar. The

1: The first color photograph made by the three-color method s­ uggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, taken in 1861 by Thomas Sutton.

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conspicuous object is by no means simply an accidental or merely humorous detail, one which playfully upends gender stereotypes; what’s more, it also functions a selfreflexive attribute of the image and its composition that usefully embodies both autochrome’s aesthetic and technique. The crocheted structure of the collar helpfully embodies the material underpinnings of the aesthetic appearance of autochrome prints, whose surfaces appear granular, almost pointillist, a result of the process

2: Kodak Magazine Advert, USA, 1950s, © The Advertising Archives / Bridgeman Images. 3: The Brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, ca. 1910, autochrome, © bpk / DR / adoc-photos.

using microscopic grains of potato starch that have been dyed red-orange, green, and blue-violet.6 The next major innovations were the slide films created by Kodak and Agfa in the 1930s and finally the color negative film invented in 1942 (fig. 2), which enabled the mass distribution of color photography and promised, at least in its advertising (fig. 4), pure joie de vivre. The compositional strategies of this photographic material alone would merit closer investigation in order to better understand how the ‘image’ of color photography developed, an image which on the one hand led to widespread global success, and on the other hand to the medium’s decades-long exclusion from the art world’s system of “valid” expressive forms. It is evident this conceptual polarization meant that color photography was broadly feminized and

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4: Alf Cooke Ltd., Leed & London and Eastman Kodak Company, Advertisement for Folding Pocket Kodak Camera featuring the Kodak Girl, lithograph, ca. 1913, 74.9 × 48.3 cm, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.

relegated to the sphere of daily life, while also being associated with commercial success. In contrast, black-and-white photography was linked to masculinity, objective documentation, Evidenz, and art. Setting aside technical accomplishments, it is instructive to more closely examine the subject matter of very early photography than has generally been done previously (indeed, more closely than is possible for both experts and the general public alike). In doing so, we shall see that as a shade of the only seemingly achromatic, color has always—that is, prior to the “official” beginning of the history of color photography—been important for photography.7 One could even take things a little further and speak of a color photography that precedes color photography.

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To this end, let us turn to what the history of photography typically considers the first photograph (fig. 5): Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s heliographic image from circa 1826. For decades, this important object in the history of photography was inaccessible to the general public. Its display in an exhibition in Mannheim in 2012 thus caused quite a sensation. The title of the exhibition was The Birth of Photography—an all-tootypical biologizing of history. The exhibition’s press release states: “With the special exhibition The Birth of Photography – Highlights of the Gernsheim Collection, the International Photography Forum (IFP) presents key moments from two centuries of photographic history. In homage to photography pioneer Helmut Gernsheim (1913–1995), and on the 100th anniversary of his birth, the exhibition combines the two parts of his unique photo collection for the first time in half a century. Among a plethora of objects important to the history of photography, the exhibition’s pièce de résistance is the world’s oldest photograph, a landscape photograph taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826.”8 The review of the exhibition in the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung even went so far as to describe it as “photography’s Big Bang.”9 Nowadays, we know that there was in fact no singular “birth” of photography, let alone a “Big Bang” moment, but the metaphor of births and beginnings retains its

5: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, heliograph in original frame, 25.8 × 29.0 cm, ca. 1826, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

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popularity.10 Such simplifying analogies create a situation in which this object of artistic and technological history is simultaneously naturalized while its value is also over-emphasized. The problem therein is that this naturalization of a linear progression of history tends to exclude the possibility of critique and also inhibits understanding of the reasons and perspectives that lead to a pluralistic narrative of history. Because of the persistent fetishization of photography’s supposed “original artifacts,” scholarship was slow to undertake wider-reaching analytical investigations. As surprising as it may seem, it was not until 2015 that two academic publications utilizing advanced research methodologies were dedicated to Nicéphore Niépce’s creation: an essay by Jessica S. McDonald entitled “A Sensational Story: Helmut Gernsheim and the ‘world’s first photograph’” which appeared in Photography and its Origins, edited by Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón, and my own treatment of the subject, “Schillernd: Die Erfindung der Schwarz-Weiß-Fotografie” (Iridescent: The Invention of Black-and-White Photography), which appeared in the proceedings of a 2013 conference in Vienna edited by Monika Wagner and Helmut Lethen. What follows here is an attempt to expand on my prior observations first made in that initial paper.11 What Nicéphore Niépce produced was a pictorial object, a glossy, asphalt-coated pewter plate. The descendants of H. Baden Pritchard, who had acquired it from Niépce’s estate, initially took it to be a mirror, and it was only by tilting it in the light that the image of the view from Niépce’s study that captured buildings and the roofs of houses in Le Gras revealed itself. Pritchard erroneously believed the view portrayed to be that of Kew Church, in whose grounds a number of English artists were buried. Evidently much can be projected onto this first photograph, an image that clearly shows very little, and Pritchard’s incorrect identification of the image’s location may have been the result of a vision partly clouded by patriotic ardor. As with the daguerreotype, which was generally a silver-coated copper plate, Niépce’s creation was a unique object. Independent of the fact that daguerreotypes were often also colorized, the tone of such images could range from gray to blue-gray and violet, and even golden brown. As soon as we begin to consider the history of their reproduction, the visual appearance of these objects becomes both more complex and more problematic. Conveying the specific material qualities of Niépce’s image to both experts and the general public alike proved challenging. Somewhat bizarrely, this also meant that the heliographic image itself was very rarely reproduced; instead, a 1952 black-andwhite photograph reproduction retouched by Helmut Gernsheim was widely disseminated in its stead. Gernsheim, whose collection was purchased by Harry Ransom and is today held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, had rediscovered Niépce’s work as part of his intensive work as a collector, which he had begun with his wife Alison Gernsheim in English exile following the end of World War II. In Gernsheim’s own telling, the legendary discovery of photography’s “original

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artifact,” spoken of with a reverence usually reserved for major archeological finds, is presented as a Holmesian detective story shaped by coincidence and good fortune, together with an unerring eye for the smallest of details. Following extensive research and after establishing contact with the last known owners, the plate was finally found, like the proverbial needle in the haystack, nestled under old books and clothing in a storage chest. 12 Gernsheim was informed, however, that the image was “completely faded”: “There was nothing to be seen.” He recounts in detail and with dis-

6: Helmut Gernsheim and Kodak Research Laboratory, Reproduction of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, gelatin silver print with applied watercolor, 20.3 × 25.4 cm, March 20 –21, 1952. The Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin. 7: Kodak Research Laboratory, Harrow, England, Reproduction of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, gelatin silver print, 20.3 × 25.4 cm, March 1952, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

cernible relish how he hurried to the site of its discovery, certain “that a bitumen picture could not fade.”13 Through this narrative, the visual complexity of heliography—and not only the framed object itself—becomes further shrouded in mystery, its secrets revealable only to the expert’s eye. Gernsheim was ultimately able to gain possession of this rarest of finds and first presented it to a large audience at the World Exhibition of Photography in Lucerne, which took place from 15 May to 31 July, 1952.14 The peculiar spots on the photographic image are by no means the result of the print’s aging process, nor are they characteristics of the original object’s metal surface. Instead, they are the result of Gernsheim’s “beautification” of the image, which comes across as almost cubist in its composition. After the Eastman Kodak Company in Harrow, England, had spent three weeks photographing Niépce’s heliographic

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8: Harry Ransom Center and J. Paul Getty Museum, Color Digital Print Reproduction of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras, 20.3 × 25.4 cm, June 2002, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

image under raking light, Gernsheim then further treated the image using watercolors. He was not able to completely eliminate the pointillist effect of the reproduction, however. He reportedly spent “nearly two days”15 applying these retouches, in order to bring forth the image, or rather the “artwork” which he believed came closest to the original and Niépce’s intention, resulting in an object which historians of photography continue to interpret in new and varied ways, in most cases without having viewed the original and the mirroring effects it contains (fig. 6). On the back of the Kodak print he had retouched, Gernsheim noted that “[t]he blotchy nature of the reproduction was the result of dust on the plate and impurities in the metal, as well as the complicated method that Kodak had to use to make the underexposed image at all visible.”16 In his 1977 article, Gernsheim reproduced the print made by Kodak in order to demonstrate that it featured even starker effects of high-contrast spots that in his opinion did not correspond to the appearance of the original whatsoever (fig. 7). His observations and the reproduction of the Kodak print as the fourth illustration in

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his article as well as the reproduction of his retouched version as the first illustration make clear that he wanted to bring transparency to the discourse surrounding the reproductions of the “world’s first photograph” in order to justify his aesthetic intervention. At the same time, however, he was forced to concede that “[a]ll the same, my reproduction was only an approximation of the original.”17 All in all, one thing is clear: what we have here is a veritable history of mistakes and restricted vision, perhaps even one that describes the failure of photographic reproduction, a history which clearly undermines the central aspiration inherent to photographic representation. The object in question is evidently one that poses extreme challenges for the process of its reproduction. On the one hand, we have a chromatically interesting object packed with visual effects, and on the other a black-and-white photographic reproduction of said object which has long determined the history of the original object’s reception. This example shows how closely intertwined the color effects of early photography and black-and-white photography can be, to say nothing of the immense importance for the process of knowledge production concerning this photographic object that emerges as a result. In 2002, the Getty Research Center produced a new digital photograph of the object as part of an international project researching the technical processes and materials used in early and analog photography (fig. 8).18 This version shows, as was to be expected, that there is little that can be discerned in the reproduction of the original object apart from a number of shimmering violet surfaces that merge seamlessly with one another. The fact that early photography was the product of certain ways of seeing and at its very beginning constrained by visual limitations is now abundantly clear. What is also evident is that we are nowadays prone to forgetting that the act of looking at photography and the repeated application of certain conventions concerning photography’s perception first had to be practiced, but also defined (and learned).19 The rapid spread of the daguerreotype in both East and West shows how immediately the entire world was fascinated by the medium of photography despite these difficulties.20 The first daguerreotype equipment reached Japan, for example, in 1849, although the country’s earliest surviving daguerreotype is dated at 1857. The research projects undertaken by the Getty Center illustrate the expanded access to the field of early photography, its materials, and its colors and hues available to modern-day researchers. Collaborating with conservator-restorers from a number of institutions, the Getty team sought to gain new knowledge of how tonal values were produced using chemical formulas containing platinum and gold. Other characteristics of early photography that have been the object of increased attention in recent times also include waxed paper negatives, with their brown, yellow, and violet hues, which were then utilized by artistically ambitious photographers making use of Gustave Le Gray’s improved wax treatment process following the invention of the wet

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9: Gustave Le Gray, Cloudy Sky, Mediterranean Sea, 1857, albumen print, no. 16 from the album “Vistas del Mar,” 30.9 × 41.8 cm, Art Institute Chicago, Hugh Edwards Fund.

collodion process.21 Today, Le Gray is seen as one of the most highly regarded early photographers for his experimental undertakings, which included working with double negatives exposed at different light values. As a result of his impressive images of sky and sea, which he combined to form a single picture, e.g. Cloudy Sky, Mediterranean Sea (1857) (fig. 9), Le Gray is often compared to Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose work makes reference to early photography and will be returned to in a later section of this essay. In light of this scientific and scholarly investigation into early photography, now accessible in all its breadth and depth, it is now possible to develop a renewed appreciation of early photography’s artifacts as material objects. Unlike with Gernsheim, this does not merely foreground objects that bear witness to the origins of the medium or key instances of innovation. Instead, treasures are found to exist in heretofore unexamined pockets of photographic history, one such example being the negative. As a catalogue accompanying Paris Photo in 2014 published by Hans P. Kraus Jr. puts it: “By their very nature, paper negatives are vulnerable and ephemeral with many lost through neglect or natural hazards, and the relatively small number that survive are like the archeological fragments of an ancient civilization.”22 With the

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assistance of digital photography, this early “history of civilization” of photography proves to be many-layered and brimming with possibility, including with regards to color and tone—telling a totally different story to the one preoccupied with the mythologization of a few key artifacts that stems from photography’s origins. Digital photography and its use in creating a visual archive of photography allows us to see photography’s colors more clearly than ever before. Of course, the small circle of internationally important collectors and experts might say: well, we always knew that. The fact is, however, that the colors of early photography have yet to be properly researched or examined from an academic or theoretical perspective. The reason behind the recent uptake of such work is entirely a product of the digital age, both in a practical sense as well as theoretically: by examining the early artifacts of photographic history, we seek to gain an understanding of a material history which we believe we have lost touch with in the digital age. This contemporary sensitivity also helps to explain the hype surrounding the apps and Photoshop filters that make digital photographs look like heliographic images or daguerreotypes, or which utilize a sepia function to give them the appearance of an albumen print.23 Alongside the oftbemoaned erasure of earlier forms that the new photographic technology is accused of perpetrating, there is also the emergence of a glimpse into a still largely untapped history of the photographic image as told through its materials and objects. In addition, these developments—commonly described as a digital revolution and seen as a paradigm shift in the history of photography—have also definitively contributed to the celebration of a particular era of analog photography and led to this era receiving more focused attention from researchers. Furthermore, it can be expected that some day a history of the techniques and materials of digital photography—with its processing power, software and hardware, printing techniques, and the materials used for pigment prints and their stabilization (e.g. with silicon and acrylic glass) will also be written.

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10: Paul Strand, Orange and Bowls, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, 1915, vintage gelatin silver print, 24.4 × 32.5 cm, signed on verso, © Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive.

Pictorialism and Straight Photography In the 1920s and 1930s, a transnational process of exchange between photographers in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, and Tokyo gave rise to a so-called New Photography, which resulted in photography discovering itself in black and white. Its aesthetic core was the black-and-white photograph, ideally rich in contrast and making use of many shades of gray (figs. 10, 11).24 Straight Photography, Neues Sehen, photography of the New Objectivity movement, and Bauhaus photography, all of which are increasingly grouped under the term “classical photography”—for the most part, these are synonyms for, and symptoms of, a photography that exhibits a Modernist aesthetic: cool, objective, concerned more with facilitating an optical experience than with capturing subjective feeling, tending towards the austere rather than the opulent. Berenice Abbott gave voice to this approach by denouncing the use of photography to express emotion and convey mood. Abbott, who while living in Paris discovered Eugène Atget’s photographs (fig. 12) and saw them as the source of formal-aesthetic innovation for the medium (fig. 13), believed that photography should teach one to see, rather than to feel. The rigid structures, bold compositions, and radical framing of her photographs—such as those for her famous project Changing New York (1935–1939), and even more evident in her photographs and photograms of scientific phenomena created in the 1950s and 1960s for MIT—find stark formal expression in black and white and the many shades of gray in between (fig. 14). Kelley Wilder is

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11: Ilse Bing, Champ de Mars from the Eiffel Tower, 1931 (printed 1950s), gelatin silver print, ferrotyped, 20.3 × 27.9 cm, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The A. W. Ellenberger, Sr., Endowment Fund 2019.179, courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art, © Estate of Ilse Bing.

right in pointing out how unusual and even radical it was to portray scientific phenomena in black and white—at a time when it had long been possible to utilize the by then mature medium of color photography for such a project.25 Abbott consciously distanced her approach from one that would emotionalize and subjectivize the basic structures of nature: “I wanted to combine science and photography in a sensible, unemotional way. Some people’s ideas of scientific photography is just arty design, something pretty. That was not the idea. The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.”26 From a present-day perspective, however, we can also see how strongly her work here still indulges in the Modernist aesthetic of the first half of the twentieth century, and that she remained faithful to the dictates of the black-and-white aesthetic.

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Learning to see through photography also means understanding photography as a means of visualization. Along with Paul Strand (fig. 15), Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Ilse Bing, to name just a few, what Abbott pursued was a conspicuous departure from Pictorialism. Because of this demarcation, statements concerning this group regarding the aesthetic and function of the photographic image sometimes come across as rhetorically overblown, such as the remarks on Paul Strand in the last issue of Camera Work in 1917, which appear to overemphasize the brutal directness of his images:

12: Jean-Eugène Auguste Atget, Au Coq Hardi, 18 Quai de la Megisserie, 1902, photograph, albumen print, 21.5 × 17.7 cm, Charles Amos Cummings Fund, 1982.412, Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 13: Berenice Abbott, Jacob ­Heymann Butcher Shop, 1938, published in the portfolio Berenice Abbott’s New York, 1979, photograph, gelatin silver print, 27.4 × 34.3 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Lois B. Torf 1989.822, © Berenice Abbott, Photograph © 2020, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 14: Berenice Abbott, Interference of Waves, 1958–1961, gelatin silver print, 27 × 31.9 cm, Purchase. Acc. no.: 21.1971, © 2020. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

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“The eleven photogravures in this number represent the real Strand. The man who has actually done something from within. The photographer who has added something to what has gone before. The work is brutally direct. Devoid of all flimflam; devoid of trickery and of any ‘ism;’ devoid of any attempt to mystify an ignorant public, including the photographers themselves. These photographs are the direct expression of today. We have reproduced them in all their brutality. We have cut out the use of the Japan tissue for these reproductions, not because of economy, but because the tissue proofs we made of them introduced a factor which destroyed the directness of Mr. Strand’s expression. In their presentation we have intentionally emphasized the spirit of their brutal directness. The eleven pictures represent the essence of Strand [italics B.G.].”27 This new photography sought to leave behind the attempt to imitate the gentle tonal values of painting (via the application of scumble and gloss) which the Pictorialists recreated in their luxurious prints through the use of a mystifying soft focus, an aesthetic approach seemingly geared towards conjuring a “yesteryear” in contrast to a photography concerned with the “here and now.” Even more so, however, it sought to distance itself from the increasingly bright and colorful appearance of Pictorialists’ photographs made possible by the advent of autochrome. Nothing could have illustrated this shift more clearly than when Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz, committed Pictorialists and giants in the arena of artistic photography, sought to distance themselves from their erstwhile painterly and Pictorialist idiom from 1910 onwards. In 1902, Stieglitz had extolled the virtues of the creative manipulation of photography and its colors, proclaiming it to be the future of artistic photography: “In order to understand the general and sudden recognition of photography as a means of artistic expression, two things must be kept in view: first, the essentially artistic aim of the modern photographer; second, the means by which he endeavors to attain them. The modern photographer […] has it in his power to direct and mold as he wills virtually every stage of making the picture. He can […] correct […]; he can even introduce color or such combinations of color by means of successive printings […] as to produce almost any effect that his taste, skill, and knowledge can dictate. […] each individual print has a distinct identity of its own that reflects the mood and feeling of its maker at the time of its production […].”28 Individuality and originality were closely tied to a photograph’s colorfulness, and it was this quality that first saw photographs finding their way into art collections: “The Brussels and Dresden art galleries were among the first to realize the individual value of pictorial photographs as original artistic creations, and have for some years been purchasing examples for their permanent art collections.”29 While Stieglitz

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15: Paul Strand, Wall Street, New York, 1915, [printed later], gelatin silver print, 18.1 × 23.5 cm, signed, © Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive.

quarreled with those who wanted to adhere to Pictorialist principles or at least did not wish to accept the rigid demarcation between the old and the new that was beginning to take place, Clarence White devoted himself to educating modern photographers, without forsaking Pictorialist techniques and their aesthetic effects. He succeeded in calling into question the assumption that there was a radical difference between Pictorialism and Straight Photography, precisely because he remained diplomatically restrained regarding his own views on the matter, unlike the emotionally charged Stieglitz. Reflecting on White’s Telegraph Poles (fig. 16), Anne McCauley writes: “A similar contrast between what could be perceived as a radically modern and abstract composition appealing to Stieglitz and a lapse into the sort of maudlin Pre-Raphaelitism that offended him can be seen in Telegraph Poles […], first shown

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and reproduced in 1901, and Elizabeth and Letitia Felix […], in the Third Philadelphia Salon in October 1900.”30 She continues: “The degree to which the White School was ‘modernist’ is a complicated issue that hinges on the problematic definition of what modernism in photography looked like between 1900 and 1914, and what it became after World War I.”31 Our contemporary understanding of the Pictorialists’ versatility as well as their technical and aesthetic innovations is in no small part due to the fact that—to Stieglitz’s joy—art collections began to acquire Pictorialist photography from an early stage in its development as an artistic movement. In 2010, the Albertina Museum in Vienna presented an exhibition of Heinrich Kühn’s work (fig. 17) under the title The Perfect Photograph, with the express aim of positioning Kühn within the history of Modernism and the avant-garde.32 That Pictorialism nowadays enjoys renewed and unpre­

16: Clarence H. White, Telegraph Poles, photogravure from original negative, in Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly, 1903, Vol. 3, p. [7], courtesy University Library Heidelberg. 17: Heinrich Kühn, Miss Mary and Lotte, after 1907, autochrome, Vienna, Öster­reichische National­bibliothek.

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judiced academic attention, however, also means that the verdict issued against it by Straight Photography, which somewhat out of necessity sought to cast Pictorialist photography as “unphotographic” in order to mark out the contours of its own selfdefinition, is a categorization that is now long since out of date. Given the extent to which “the photographic” now transcends genre, discipline, and even medium, Straight Photography’s assertions no longer appear sustainable or binding. New Photography did have an important historic function, however. It freed the medium from the inferior position it had previously held in relation to fine art. The black-and-white photograph was an appropriate device for the facilitation of a medium’s aesthetic autonomy, a medium which has long since found and maintained its place in the pantheon of art. Photography as an art form can therefore today avail itself of the full spectrum of its aesthetic and technological possibilities, whether that means surrendering to the thrall of color or utilizing the cool touch of black and white. As with all art, what really counts is the subject matter—or, in the case of Andreas Gursky and Hiroshi Sugimoto, the conscious abandoning of content in favor of a conceptual approach derived from visual theory.

Gursky and Sugimoto Within photography, the aesthetic paradigms of color and black and white that have historically played a central role in the medium’s ongoing struggle for artistic and aesthetic autonomy, have been largely dismantled by contemporary photographic practice (as seen in Hans Danuser’s approach, for example, explored in his contribution to this book). In order to better understand this process, I will examine works by Andreas Gursky and Hiroshi Sugimoto that the artists themselves conceived as a kind of self-reflexive “dialogue” with pre-existing photographs and artworks. At play in these images is both the rivalry between painting and photography as well as the significance of the use of color in the latter medium.33 The first “dialogue” is between Gursky and Barnett Newman (fig. 18).34 Here, the monumental, large-format, digitally assembled and edited photograph of the Düsseldorf photo artist and former student of Bernd Becher Gursky tussles with the American color field painting of Newman—and not least with Newman’s conception of what modern art is, namely something that transcends temporal limitations to address the observer directly in order that they might see a reflection of their own humanity (fig. 19). Needless to say, the intrapictorial encounter—which, given the attention it garnered, can also be understood as a kind of cleverly chosen “joint venture” on the part of Gursky—also contains elements of a traditional artistic rivalry. Here, however, the clash is between media, taking place on the plane of contemporary art in the form of a kind of visual “appropriation.” That Gursky’s intent with this work is to outdo Newman is abundantly clear. The fact that Gursky’s image, when revealed to the

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18: Andreas Gursky, Rückblick (“Review”), 2015, inkjet print, 242.5 × 477 × 6.5 cm, © Andreas Gursky / Courtesy Sprüth Magers / 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich.

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19: Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950–1951, oil on canvas, 242.2 × 541.7 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller. Acc. n.: 240.1969 © The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York / 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich; Digital image © 2020, The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence.

world in 2015, was considered the largest photograph in the world, proves that it was also a metaphorical showdown between the two artists: who here is the bigger, better artist, which work has more “greatness” to offer? The painting of Newman’s that Gursky presents in his photograph is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and bears the title Vir Heroicus Sublimis, translated into English as “Man, heroic and sublime.”35 Fittingly, at the time of its creation, this was also the largest work that Newman had produced. Like almost no other of Newman’s paintings, with its intense red—divided up by thin vertical lines that give it a rhythmic quality—it celebrates color’s victory as a means of making the act of seeing and perceiving in and of itself a subject of art. What exactly does that mean? The monochrome paintings of Newman and his peers such as Mark Rothko represented a radical departure from the tradition of the artistic image while also distinguishing themselves from the imagery of mass media. Newman’s “pure,” non-representational mode of painting was intended to serve a resolute subjectivism completely removed from everyday experience and any historical context. Here, however, “subjective” also means not confusing subjective perception with an ego-driven identity, but rather to “innocently,” as it were, experience the act of seeing detached from all codifications, projections, learned ideas, and desires that one may otherwise hold. Being in the presence of such non-referential color and form should facilitate selfawareness both in the artist as well as the observer. The goal is thus not to convey

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content or a message but rather to present the image as a medium of primal and potentially beneficial (perceptual) experience, of total liberation; this feeling is intensified by being in such close proximity to the image that the surrounding space, that is, the classification of the image as an object in space, fades away.36 In his text “The Sublime is Now,” Newman formulated his conceptual ideal as follows: “We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images [...]. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have been the devices of Western European painting. [...] The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”37 What does this mean for Gursky’s adaptation of Newman’s work? Unlike Newman, Gursky is not striving to create abstract art. “Abstract photography” plays no role in Gursky’s practice and as a term is of little use in the academic categorization of his work.38 Rather, the visual statement he presents here suggests that, like the painter, Gursky is interested in related questions of non-referentiality. This despite being a photographer whose work continually seeks to chip away at the inescapable aspiration and topos of photography as a medium of representation. This is a task which—at least theoretically and conceptually—likely requires constant repetition, given that photography which eschews a representative or documentary function—and thereby also sidesteps political or social critique, or some other form of “engagement”—will always be forced to justify its existence. In short, Gursky is able to demonstrate not only the triumph of the role of color in the act of pure seeing, but also the demand to have photography viewed as fine art, which he achieves—rather directly—by inserting small digital busts of the German chancellors Gerhard Schröder, Helmut Schmidt, Angela Merkel, and Helmut Kohl at the image’s lower edge. Although much can be read into Gursky’s choosing of these politicians, ultimately, in Rückblick (Review), they primarily serve as figures apprehended from behind. As a result, the quartet exist simply as viewers of art and must, in the presence of the artwork—like anyone viewing Newman and Gursky’s works—confront themselves, their own sentiments, their emotions, and their perceptions in the face of art. This orientation towards the observer is a common feature of the work of both the Abstract Expressionists and the photographers of the Düsseldorf School, meaning that Gursky’s image also functions as a statement on these two key “schools” and their influence on the history of international art and photography. A glance at the meditative position afforded visitors to the Rothko Chapel in Texas (fig. 20) and an example of Thomas Struth’s pictures of museum-goers (fig. 21) may assist in illustrating this conceptual link. Somewhat con-

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20: Thomas Struth, The Rothko Chapel, Houston 2007, chromogenic print, 178.0 × 233.9 cm, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery © Thomas Struth. 21: Thomas Struth, Art Institute of Chicago 2, Chicago 1990, chromogenic print, 184 × 219 cm, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery © Thomas Struth.

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troversially, Robert Rosenblum has drawn direct comparisons between color field painting and German Romanticism.39 Regardless of one’s position concerning such chronologically ordered art-historical narratives, and particularly the thesis that the “artists of the North” generally sought to convey religious experience in their use of landscape and empty space,40 it is difficult to deny that the rear-profiled chancellors do invoke the artist whose key works first made the “figure from behind” an acceptable artistic subject: Caspar David Friedrich. Whether in the now-iconic The Monk by the Sea (1808–1810) (fig. 22), On the Sailing Boat (1818–1820) (fig. 23), or Moonrise Over the Sea (1822), these rear-facing figures seem to unfailingly involve the observer in the image, and in so doing create a space into which the viewer can project their own perceptions. In a manner that recalls the Romantic idiom, amorphous natural phenomena induce the contemplation of universal questions of being, while a diffuse silhouette of a city dissolving in luminous color is suffused with expectations for the future. In the admittedly surprisingly modern appearance of these paintings, Rosenblum saw a non-referentiality of Romantic provenance. Friedrich’s paintings, however, also contain strictly linear elements typically native to drawing, such as the masts and rigging of ships, which in turn are reminiscent of Newman’s vertical lines, almost as if the tension between the dissolution of the picture’s limits through the effect of color and the restrictive capacity of the line were also of decisive importance; as if the artist sought to prevent at all costs the possibility of non-referentiality

22: Caspar David Friedrich, Der Mönch am Meer (“Monk by the Sea”), 1808–1810, oil on canvas, 110 × 171.5 cm, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Andres Kilger. 23: Caspar David Friedrich, Auf dem Segler (“On a Sailing Ship”), between 1818 and 1820, oil on canvas, 71 × 56 cm, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

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granting license to infinite emptiness or the roar of a sprawling metaphysics. For the supposedly empty spaces that populate modern art, the function of containment and thus perhaps also of producing a focus on content remain an option—at least as a form of artistic self-referentiality. Alongside the perceived historical and political nature of Gursky’s photograph represented by the inclusion of the German chancellors, the monumental scope of the image has prompted speculation in the press that it represents a new form of historical visual art that can be seen as a continuation of the large-format history paintings of the nineteenth century. The linchpin of this argument is the fact that Gursky presented Review to the public on the exact date of the 25th anniversary of German reunification, as part of an exhibition at the privately owned Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden. The historical context of the work’s presentation may have been over-determined, however, as was the knee-jerk art-historical reflex to assign it to the field of historical painting. Gursky’s photograph pointedly avoids reviving the classical history painting of yore but is instead a staunchly self-assured commentary on an artwork that ultimately transcends social, political, and contemporary issues and events. This also stems from the fact that an international audience will have quickly forgotten the specific reference to the four chancellors, who are not even presented as front-facing figures, let alone agents of history (although they are, at least Kohl and Merkel, for sure). Here, Newman and Gursky find common ground: not only do they avoid creating a lasting historical reference and thus the production of concrete positions and meaning, they in fact demonstrably refuse such connections. In this, Gursky chose the ideal “cast” for the demonstration of photography as an art form: his photograph is also a kind of stage, on which he directs different artistic media to perform for his benefit. Gursky’s various statements concerning his art make reference to his desire to create work “for eternity,”41 in which he ultimately pursues an academic ideal of fine art rather than work in service to a state, a history, or a perspective that seeks to document and critique society.42 Once again, it is important to stress that in his reference to Newman’s work, Gursky also appropriates his artistic conception of the unmediated viewing experience, which in turn can be traced back to John Ruskin. Ruskin, a nineteenth-century art theorist, art historian, and social reformer, hypothesized a child-like “innocence of the eye,” based on contemporaneous scientific research concerning subjective vision, which he believed could be solicited by art.43 Ruskin’s historical pedagogical impetus was aimed at raising awareness of the difference between direct experience and acquired knowledge (according to Ruskin, people do not see sunlit grass as yellow because they know that grass is green).44 In the 1950s and 1960s, Ruskin’s writings were rediscovered by artists in New York. The current state of scientific research on human perception confirms that the recognition of shapes and colors must be learnt in the first years of a child’s life. This process of acquisition can of course not be

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24: Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III, 1967, oil on canvas, Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, © The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York / 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich.

depicted, but the visual art forms of painting and photography could and can use a variety of formal aesthetic approaches to appeal to this “primal,” child-like mode of vision and perception, such as overtly assembled composite images that at first glance appear “unfinished,” or works of pure abstraction.45 It is worth asking why, in the art of the modern era, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing up until the present, the act of seeing and of making visible has been and continues to be such a prominent theme—as well as whether this timeless “formula” will still be of use in future. There are, evidently, social and political structures in the modern era and the present which are particularly conducive to exploring these themes. The Abstract Expressionists, for example, sought to turn away from what they felt was a decipherable system of meaning in art that had become ossified. In short, they wanted to counteract the adult, bourgeois fear of a child-like way of seeing free of convention and prejudice. This helps explain the title of a series of large-format paintings by Newman. Alluding to Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the 1966 film adaptation of which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and held a mirror up to a society characterized by coercion, fear, and convention, Newman named his series of paintings Who’s afraid of red, yellow, and blue?

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25: Andreas Gursky, Salerno I, 1990, C-print, 170 × 205 × 5 cm, © Andreas Gursky / Courtesy Sprüth Magers / 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich.

(1966–1970, fig. 24). Somewhat ironically, the success of the film, which recalls a chamber play, derives in no small part from the fact that it is shot in black and white, with cinematographer Harry Stradling having a significant impact on the film’s aesthetic, although it was Haskell Wexler who was responsible for the black and white and as such the dark grey tone of the movie. The “story” of the “black” comedy came to be seen as an abstraction, as a kind of shorthand for a psychologically damaged society. “High” art was the first medium to successfully declare color a similar abstraction of such fundamental, visual aspirations, which require the co-operation of the observer in order to be fulfilled. In order to achieve this aim in art and photography, color must strictly avoid becoming coded, symbolic, or metaphorical. Color should—and must—be non-referential in order to be of artistic significance. Consequently, the Abstract Expressionists reacted with particular disdain to the teachings of the Bauhaus, especially those of Johannes Itten, who built upon Goethe’s subject-oriented theory of colors to create a semantic theory of color in the manner of “theories pertaining to temperament and race.” This “‘relational’ form of European painting, based on

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26: Andreas Gursky, Rhein II, 1999, C-print, 206 × 356 × 6.2 cm, © Andreas Gursky / Courtesy Sprüth Magers / 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich.

contrast, was then revised by the ‘monochromes’ of ‘color field painting’. When thinking in relation to the sublime, color should retain the sort of explosive force that induces in the viewer a transcendent experience that journeys beyond the visually perceptible.”46 The intent here was to provoke a moment of self-perception, of self-enlightenment, one in which everything extraneous fades out of view and wherein the overwhelming experience of color eliminates all externally guided or instilled attempts at meaning-making. Indeed, the notion of a physiology of subjective sight cannot be directly carried across to photography or the eye of the camera. The eye of the camera is considered objective and cannot replicate the way we see as humans, but an artistic re-staging of the viewing of an image, however, particularly images subjectively manipulated by the artist, as with Gursky’s, is much more capable of such replication. Paradoxically, it is precisely the images that people would not be able to experience in nature—Gursky’s digitally constructed and structured elevated perspectives that depict the non-places of the global postmodern era (fig. 25), the structured and

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objectivized depiction of the Rhine (fig. 26), as well as Sugimoto’s Seascapes (fig. 27)— that challenge our subjective sight as being the primary way of experiencing the world. They achieve this by frustrating an easy deciphering of the objects and locations they depict. One could say that the visual points of view in Gursky’s and Sugimoto’s work facilitate the subjective experience of seeing. On a physiological level, a kind of “Ganzfeld” (complete field) is perceived, which to a large extent impedes spatial orientation and thus has a disorienting effect on the viewer. Relatedly, it is worth noting that Sugimoto’s Seascapes are generally accompanied by specific light installations when exhibited: the exhibition space of his 2015 show Past and Present in Three Parts at the Chiba City Museum of Art, for example, was kept dimly lit, while the photographs, presented on a gently curved exhibition wall, were indirectly lit so as to appear almost immaterial, like apparitions. The borders of the individual images were no longer discernible, resulting in a chiaroscuro effect that radiated an almost-sacred aura, recalling the installations of James Turrell.47 In this provocative, disruptive act

27: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tyrrhenian Sea, Conca, 1994, gelatin silver print, 119.4 × 149.2 cm, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery © Hiroshi Sugimoto.

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of seeing that defies easy conceptualization, the observer is able—at least, this is the idea—to find their way to themselves. In looking, the self perceives its own existence. This is, of course—in addition to the obvious reference to Abstract Expressionism—an extremely romanticized conception of art, something also reflected in way these artists understand their own practice. For his part, Gursky is adamant that his inner world is the source of his images. In interviews and the press, his remarks have led to him being labeled an “alien” who

28: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Distorted Universal Vision (SelfPortrait), 2003, gelatin silver print, 36.8 × 29.5 cm, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery © Hiroshi Sugimoto.

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encounters “our world ignorantly”—a totally unique creature.48 When, at the Getty Museum in 2008, Sugimoto was asked which aspects of his work were Japanese and which American, or whether they all blur together, he answered by saying that such thinking does not apply to his work. His art, he continued, stems from only one source— himself. In his self-portraits, Sugimoto emphasizes this position of an inward-facing vision being the intrinsic source of his art. His glasses are almost opaquely white (fig. 28) or, in the case of an image where he poses as a scientist conducting an experiment, blue (fig. 29). The glasses pointedly serve as a visual aid that turn his gaze inward. In these images, Sugimoto plays with the iconography of glasses that has been a regular fixture in artists’ self-portraits since around 1800 (figs. 30, 31, 32), where from the outset they were intended to signify the achievement and dedication of the painter and the scholar. In Chardin’s self-portraits, the artist achieves an almost abstract presentation of his pastel painting methods, detached from mimetic function, by placing them within the circular frames of his spectacles—the idea being that the viewer will learn to view the surface and materiality of the painting as worthy of contemplation of themselves. In these paintings, the focus is on the work itself and the process of its “making,” rather than a social or psychological representation of the artist. The artist’s gaze is not primarily focused on the external; instead, it is transformed to reflect the idea or intellect that lies within.49 The modern artist—from Chardin to Sugimoto—thus shields themselves from cultural and historical influences and conditions, and in particular from co-optation. In saying that he doesn’t actually live anywhere, but is instead always on an airplane, Sugimoto underscores his freedom in a way that is characteristically pronounced and ironic. By emphasizing his status of artist as subject, Sugimoto positions his medium’s representative function as being merely a tool in service of an idea that originates within himself. The resounding success of Gursky’s and Sugimoto’s conceptual framework, which has since inspired a plethora of interpretations, raises the question of the function that this kind of art performs for us in the present. Any attempt to answer this question inevitably leads to a critical appraisal of what we expect from art in general. Why exactly is this conception of the image so successful? One reason may lie in its radical delocalization of motifs and compositional styles in favor of a more global reception and distribution. In this sense, Gursky and Sugimoto have no desire to be German, Japanese, or American. Despite this, they still require a recognizable hook, or visual idiom, in order to both transmit and consolidate their vision, at once global and mystifying, at the moment of its unveiling. In this respect, Henry Fox Talbot—the English inventor of the calotype, the first negative-positive process—functions as a kind of historical anchoring point for Sugimoto: although Sugimoto continues to be described as an artist who works exclusively in the medium of black-and-white photography, he himself has made reference to the many color tones that characterized Talbot’s prints

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29: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Self-Portrait, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery © Hiroshi Sugimoto. 30: Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Self-portrait with an Easel, ca. 1771, pastel on blue paper, 40.7 × 32.5 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre, © bpk / RMN Grand Palais / Jean-Gilles Berizzi. 31: Joshua Reynolds, Self-portrait, ca. 1788, oil on panel, 75.1 × 63.4 cm, Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. 32: Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Self-portrait with spectacles, ca. 1797–1800, oil on canvas, 54 × 39.5 cm, Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, © bpk / Alfredo Dagli Orti.

and which help to make each of the many thousand specimens of these talbotypes still in existence a unique object.50 Sugimoto furnished the prints he made from Talbot’s original negatives (figs. 33, 34) with intense shades of color, inspired by Talbot’s original prints, which have rarely been shown to the general public. In this regard, Sugimoto’s research practice as a historian of photography coalesces with his knowledge gathered through his prac-

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33: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Roofline of Lacock Abbey, ca. 1835–1839, 2008, toned gelatin silver print, 93.7 × 74.9 cm, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery © Hiroshi Sugimoto.

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34: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Louisa Gallwey and Horatia Feilding, at Lacock Abbey, August 29, 1842, 2009, toned gelatin silver print, 93.7 × 74.9 cm, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery © Hiroshi Sugimoto.

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tice and his experimental spirit as an artist. His expertise helped him recognize something in the work of his historical forerunner Talbot that had eluded most museum curators and art historians: the colors of early photography. As a person viewing one of the images created by Sugimoto begins to make historical connections and comparisons, the work becomes newly charged with meaning. Just as with Gursky’s work, however, the viewer should not linger intellectually on the historical anchor point for too long. Ultimately, Sugimoto’s works are intended to appeal to the viewer’s pure, unmediated sight and experience of self.51 No particular historical or literary education is necessary. This is art completely free of any attempt to either critique society or provoke its reform. The attempt by classical photographers to pair the geometric structures of Neues Sehen with a new awareness of social injustice, combining—if not synthesizing—the artistic and documentary aspects of photography in the process (fig. 35), is absent from the spectrum of aesthetic and conceptual approaches employed by Sugimoto and Gursky. Though the connection to identifiable places and social spaces is not entirely abandoned, the autonomous artistic aesthetic dominates. This enables both figures to more easily understand themselves as artists, rather than photographers, and conceive of the photographic image in view of its inherent destination being the art museum. As an art form, photography is more or less forced to live with this paradox: as soon as it is placed in a museum, it becomes “contemporary art.” It is also this institutional and systematic process that makes the relationship between artistic media and means of expression—photography and painting, black and white and color—a relationship that both Gursky and Sugimoto cleverly foreground with their works, which are also always operating on a pointedly theoretical level as well. On top of this, in 2009 Sugimoto engineered a completely unique relocalization of his work with the founding of the Odawara Art Foundation and the building of its Enoura Observatory. This large art facility, opened to the public in 2017 but yet to be fully completed, is located in the countryside 40 kilometers southeast of Tokyo on the other side of Sagami Bay. Here, Sugimoto situates his globally circulating artworks in a location dedicated to traditional Japanese art and architecture that also features a teahouse and antique theatre. After visitors have enjoyed the multifaceted experience of art and nature that the observatory offers, they find themselves once again walking through a tunnel, beckoned onwards by a glimpse of the sea at the other end. The reference to the Walter Benjamin memorial Passages in Port Bou created by Dani Karavan is unmistakable, but one senses that Casa Malaparte on Capri, made famous by Jean-Luc Godard’s film Contempt (1963), forms part of its artistic heritage as well. Inspired by these associations, one then enters the gallery containing the Seascapes series, which juts out over the sea, and is thus able to experience Sugimoto’s depictions of the ocean in a striking juxtaposition with the adjacent sea. The intent here seems clear: the “colorless” works of art directly challenge the “colors” of nature,

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35: Ilse Bing, Soupe Populaire, 1931, © Estate of Ilse Bing.

which in turn takes on pictorial form as a result of the gallery’s structure. Viewed here, the Seascapes appear to capture the essence of a shifting reality. Do we ever look at the sea without having an image or a memory already in our mind? Can nature be experienced and remembered without the process of seeing and consciousness initiated by art? More importantly, this “display” authenticates the unbounded view and “floating” observational standpoint that the Seascapes evoke, which is also conceptualized in Gursky’s monumental photographs. Despite the concrete, caption-verified locations depicted in these images, they also offer a transcendental experience. In the history of painting, the elevated status that both Gursky’s and Sugimoto’s images thus attain can in principle be compared to Canaletto’s achievements within the veduta genre. With his deployment of a “floating” observational standpoint and the constructions of views across Venice and London that did not correspond with reality, the Italian painter supplemented the decree to imitate nature with the loftier theoretical principles of idea and invenzione. For Canaletto, too, it was a matter of how his art was appreciated and of investigating the perception and awareness of its viewers. In a brochure for Odawara, Sugimoto also responds to the critical question of what art should be today by describing it as an instrument of human consciousness:

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“Today, as we stand at a critical point in our evolution, art has lost its onetime clarity of purpose. What should art today express? We cannot answer this question simply, but what we can do is return to the wellspring of human consciousness, explore its sources, and chart the course it has followed so far.”52

Conclusion Enlightenment obtained through visual experience was a feature of aesthetic education programs of the eighteenth century. It is therefore not surprising to find that Ruskin’s ideas concerning child-like and natural sight referenced by the abstract expressionists were also expressed by the art critic and encyclopedist Diderot around 1760. Diderot wrote: “I feel I need to make myself another pair of eyes when I look at other artist's paintings; to see Chardin's I need only keep those that nature gave me and use them well.”53 In a similar vein, art historian Max Imdahl has attested to eighteenth-century painters already possessing a “cognizance of the act of sight.”54 The aspiration to induce the viewer’s child-like sight to demonstrate the nature of seeing in general, and indeed involve the viewer in this process, belongs to an age which was yet to fully uncover the viewing subject as an autonomously acting and thinking person who actively participates in the perceptual experience of art and was aware of their relational position as a viewer. Back then it was still about art being able to make the anonymous members of an art-viewing public aware of sight and the act of seeing. In other words, art was supposed to provide broad swathes of people (including the uneducated) with a kind of training ground on which to exercise the self. It is no coincidence that learning the act of seeing and self-awareness became important forms of subject matter for art at the beginning of the bourgeois age—that is, at the time of a “structural transformation of society.”55 Nowadays it is as if we are re-experiencing this process of learning to see through art, first intensely discussed over 250 years ago, in a new way—namely, through the medium of photography. The colors and artistic conceptions of seeing as utilized in transnational contemporary art have dismantled established dichotomies. The argument according to which black and white is the palette of truth in photography—an idea still advocated by Roland Barthes in 198056—while the use of color in artistic photography is akin to the tasteless over-application of make-up, is long since dead and buried. It is also for this reason that a new history of photography’s colors can begin to be constructed, one which incorporates the histories as well as the legendary and anecdotal “stories” of both black-and-white and color photography, understanding them as two interrelated and competing narratives of the image that at times drift away from one another only to find themselves later re-united.

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Notes 1

Bill Watterson, The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury (Kansas City, MO: Andrews and McMeel, 1992), 151. 2 “In Conversation: Hiroshi Sugimoto with Timothy Potts,” interview at the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2014, https://youtu.be/Qa0noNt3tl8. Accessed August 4, 2020. 3 Robert Frank in Nathan Lyons, Photographers on Photography: A Critical Anthology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 66. 4 See Sally A. Stein, “FSA Color: The Forgotten Document,” Modern Photography 43, no. 1 (January 1979): 90–99; 162–164; 166; idem, The Rhetoric of the Colorful and the Colorless: ­American Photography and Material Culture between the Wars (PhD Dissertation: Yale University, 1991). See also John Rohrbach, Color: American Photography Transformed, (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), as well as Paul Hendrickson, Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939–43 (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2004). 5 1914 – Welt in Farbe: Farbfotografie vor dem Krieg, exh. cat., LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013); Ludger Derenthal and Stefanie Klamm (eds.), Fotografie im Ersten Weltkrieg, exh. cat., Museum für Fotografie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 2014). See also: Farbfehler! Gegen das Verschwinden der Farbfotografien, proceedings from a conference of the Landschaftsverband Rheinland et al., Rundbrief Fotografie, special issue 5 (Göppingen: Museumsverband Baden-Württemberg, 1998). 6 Regarding the early period of color photography, see Brian Coe, Colour Photography: The First Hundred Years 1840–1940 (London: Ash & Grant, 1978). For an overview of the history of color photography in the context of the history of film, see the database “Timeline of Historical Film Colors” collated by film historian Barbara Flückiger, University of Zurich, who oversees the two major projects “Film Colors: Technologies, Culture, Institutions” and “Film Colors: Bridging the Gap between Technology and Aesthetics,” accessible at https://zauberklang. ch/filmcolors/. Accessed August 4, 2020. Regarding the history of autochrome in the United Kingdom, see Caroline Fuchs, Das Autochrom in Großbritannien: Revolution der Farbfotografie, Studies in Theory and History of Photography 9 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). 7 See also the contributions to this book by Kelley Wilder and Kim Timby. In terms of the history of concepts in research into the history of coloring, it was initially Ernst Strauss who coined the concept of a “colorless” hue; Ernst Strauss, “Zu den Anfängen des Helldunkels,” in Hefte des Kunsthistorischen Seminars der Universität München, ed. Hans Sedlmayr (Munich: Max Hueber, 1959), 1–19. Cf. Ursula Seibold-Bultmann, “Licht oder Farbe? Das ­Kolorit Constables am Beispiel der Ansichten von Hampstead Heath,” Zeitschrift für Kunst­ geschichte 1 (1992): 97–123; and Bettina Gockel, Kunst und Politik der Farbe: Gainsboroughs Portraitmalerei (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1999), 60–72. The idea that the “colorless” hues of black, white, and gray do in fact belong to the color spectrum was set out by Wilhelm ­Ostwald in Einführung in die Farbenlehre (Leipzig 1919). See Gregor Wedekind, “Grau als Modus des Uneigent­lichen bei Gerhard Richter,” in Magdalena Bushart and Gregor Wedekind, eds., Die Farbe Grau, Phoenix. Mainzer Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek 1 (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 267–285, here 267, footnote 2. 8 See: http://photography-now.com/exhibition/85188. Accessed August 4, 2020. Cf. Helmut Gernsheim, “The 150th Anniversary of Photography,” History of Photography, vol. 1, no. 1 (1977): 3–8; Alfried Wieczorek and Claude W. Sui, eds., The Birth of Photography. Highlights of the Gernsheim Collection, exh. cat., Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2012).

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  9 The title of the FAZ article was “Der Urknall der Fotografie” (Photography’s Big Bang), ­September 6, 2012. 10 Cf. Geoffrey Batchen, “Origins without End,” in Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Zervigón, eds., Photography and its Origins (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), 67–81. 11 Jessica S. McDonald is the Nancy Inman and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Curator of Photography at the Harry Ransom Center. See Jessica S. McDonald, “A Sensational Story: ­Helmut Gernsheim and the ‘World’s first photograph’,” in Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario ­Zervigón, eds., Photography and its Origins (see note 10), 15–28; Bettina Gockel, “Schillernd: Die Erfindung der Schwarz-Weiß-Fotografie,” in Monika Wagner and Helmut Lethen, eds., Schwarz-Weiß als Evidenz (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2015), 156–170. 12 Gernsheim, “The 150th Anniversary of Photography” (see note 8), 6. For more on Gernsheim’s image formation, see http://iphf.org/inductees/helmut-gernsheim/. Accessed August 4, 2020. 13 Gernsheim, “The 150th Anniversary of Photography” (see note 8), 6. 14 For more on Gernsheim’s narrative of discovery and the objects’ acquisition by the Harry Ransom Center, see also Jessica S. McDonald, “A Sensational Story” (see note 11), esp. 24–26. The authors of the book cited here do not go into detail concerning the original topoi of the colors of photography. 15 Gernsheim, “The 150th Anniversary of Photography” (see note 8), 8. 16 Cited in The Birth of Photography (see note 8), 97 [in German in the original. Translation here by Ryan Eyers and Joel Scott for Gegensatz Translation Collective. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from German sources are by the translators]. 17 Cited in ibid. 18 See “Scientific Analysis of World’s First Photograph,” The GCI Newsletter 17.1 (2002): www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/newsletters/17_2/gcinews1.html. Accessed August 4, 2020; Dusan Stulik, “Conservation of Photographic Collections: A New Collaborative Project at the GCI,” The GCI Newsletter 17.1 (2002): www.getty.edu/conser­ vation/publications_resources/newsletters/17_1/news_in_cons1.html. Accessed August 4, 2020. 19 In the essay referenced below, I have taken up this subject in more depth and sought to show that—starting in the eighteenth century—painting and film also played a part in the pedagogical mission of “learning to see” through images: Bettina Gockel, “Bilder für Blinde – Sehen und Handeln in Malerei, Fotografie und Film: Ein Versuch” in Horst Bredekamp und John Michael Krois, eds., Sehen und Handeln (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 65–98. 20 Alan Trachtenberg, “The Daguerreotype and Antebellum America,” in Bettina Gockel, ed., in collaboration with Patrizia Munforte, American Photography: Local and Global Contexts, Studies in Theory and History of Photography 2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012), 1–14; Shelley Rice, “Local Space/Global Visions: Alfred Stieglitz, Albert Kahn, and the Visual Geography of the Early Twentieth Century,” in ibid., 49–69. 21 Cf. Hans P. Kraus Jr., Paper Negatives, Paris Photo exhibition brochure, Grand Palais, Paris 2014, [n.p.]. 22 Ibid., n.p. [p. 1]. 23 These “retro” filters can be found in iPhone apps such as ProCamera or TinType by Hipstamatic. 24 Cf. fig. 10 Kaspar M. Fleischmann, “Why Paul Strand?,” in Gockel, ed. American Photography (see note 20), 105–130, esp. 111. 25 For more on this subject as well as on the most recent exhibitions of Berenice Abbott’s work, see Kelley Wilder, “Curious about Color,” Aperture, no. 211 (Summer 2013): 52–56, esp. 55.

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26 Berenice Abbott cited in Nathan Lyons, ed., Photographers on Photography: A Critical Anthology (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 21. 27 Our illustrations in Camera Work 49/50, 36: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/ camera_work1917_49_50/0062/text_ocr. Accessed August 4, 2020. 28 Alfred Stieglitz, “Modern Pictorial Photography,” The Century Magazine 64 (October 1902), 824–825. Access the digitized version of The Century Magazine at https://www.unz. com/print/Century-1902oct-00822/. Accessed August 4, 2020. 29 Ibid., 825. The article’s illustrations included Gertrude Käsebier’s Red Man, one of all in all six photogravures published in the first issue of Camera Work. See also Adrienne Lundgren, “Cyanotype, Platinum and Palladium Printing: The Siderotype Artistry of Clarence H. White,” in Clarence H. White and his World: The Art & Craft of Photography, 1895–1925, exh. cat, ed. Anne McCauley, Princeton University Art Museum (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2017), 342–352, 342. 30 Anne McCauley, “Amateur Photography and the Poetry of the Everyday,” in Clarence H. White and his World (see note 29), 19–87, 63. 31 Idem, “Beyond the Classroom: White as a Teacher,” in Clarence H. White and his World (see note 29), 241–285, 264. 32 Heinrich Kühn: Die vollkommene Fotografie, exh. cat., ed. Monika Faber and Astrid Mahler, Albertina Wien (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010). 33 Artists have been cultivating the artistic rivalry as a strategic, demonstrative exhibition of strength designed to mutually benefit both parties’ fame and significance since time immemorial. In the eighteenth century the rivalry between artists provoked by the competitive exhibiting environment found its way into the art academies. One such example is when Reynolds and Gainsborough both painted portraits of actress Sarah Siddons in decidedly different modes and presented them to the public in such a way that it was a case of artistically irreconcilable and therefore even more original concepts (a portrait of character versus a portrait of society; achromatic, Rembrandtesque use of color versus striking color). Nowadays we would speak of both painters having emphasized their “signature styles.” William Turner’s engagement with Claude Lorrain’s work can also be understood as a conscious “rivalry,” one which led Turner to making the donation of his painting Dido Building Carthage, or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815) to the National Gallery in London conditional on it being hung next to Lorrain’s (in the National Gallery the artist’s name is given as simply “Claude”: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/claude) Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648) (Room 15 Inventory number Turner: NG498, Inventory ­number Claude Lorrain: NG14). Turner wanted to outdo the Old Master and show that, both aesthetically and in terms of content, he had radicalized his idea of making colored light the “director” of the image. The work of Andreas Gursky analyzed in this essay takes a similar approach (in this case with respect to the work of Barnett Newman). 34 See Andreas Gursky, exh. cat. Museum Frieder Burda, ed. Udo Kittelmann, (Baden Baden; ­Göttigen: Steidl Verlag, 2015); cf. Udo Kittelmann, “Das denkende Auge: Zur Ausstellung von Andreas Gursky im Museum Frieder Burda,” in ibid, 9–12, here 12. Kittelmann only briefly comments on Review, stating that “with a dogged vehemence, this image by the artist also makes itself the focus of social discussions.” 35 Newman and Erwin Panofsky famously quarreled over the work’s title. As the result of an editorial mistake, the title was erroneously printed in a 1961 issue of ARTNews as Vir Heroicus Sublimus instead of Vir Heroicus Sublimis. Barnett Newman wrote in May 1961: “Sir [to the ­editor Alfred M. Frankfurter; B.G.]: […] Had Panofsky read the article, it would have been

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obvious to him that it is a misprint because in Professor Rosenblum’s article, the word is spelled as I intended it, ‘Sublimis’. Only in the caption is it ‘Sublimus’. Were I to follow the Panosfskian dialectic, I could charge that he is above reading the text, or that he did not read, or that he cannot read. I shall not, however, stoop to the Panofskian techniques in order to hope that the third of these is true: I shall be generous enough to believe that he attacked me without reading the text. […].” (Erwin Panofsky, Korrespondenz 1957 bis 1961, ed. Dieter Wuttke (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), 931–932.) See also Beat Wyss, Ein Druckfehler: Panofsky versus Newman – Verpasste Chancen eines Dialogs (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1993). 36 The notion of total non-referentiality is a theoretically contested concept primarily discussed in relation to performance art. In principle, American color field painting pursues a similar subversive strategy to performance art, even if the paintings themselves lack this ephemeral quality. The perceptual experience of the viewer, of central conceptual importance, is ephemeral, however. When Peggy Phelan writes that “learning to see is training careful blindness” (Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 13), she describes the attempt by both Newmann and Gursky to strip away the attributions and projections that are inherent to conventionalized visibility. That these can only be made possible by a specific act of art production (performance) and the act of observing art goes without saying. Cf. The critical discussion of this approach by ­Phelan in Andrea Seier, Remediatisierung: die performative Konstitution von Gender und Medien (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007), 60–62. Seier is justifiably skeptical that it makes sense, from a media theory perspective, to ascribe the performative with the quality of resistance. The extent to which referentiality is actually negated may well depend on the context of the production and viewing of art. The provocation of the “sublime” as a strategy to overwhelm does in any case have the potential to disrupt—or make one, in a sense, “blind” to—the conventionalized system of referentiality in order to experience a moment of “true” reality. The slogan “The Sublime is Now” addresses the fact that the subversive experience is temporally constrained and can only occur in the moment. It is doubtful whether this postmodern ideal and concept has attained a timeless significance. 37 Barnett Newman, “The Sublime is Now” [1948], in idem, Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill New York (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 170–173. 38 Cf. also John Yau, “Ein Blick auf Bangkok (2011),” in Andreas Gursky: Bangkok, exh. cat., Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, ed. Beat Wismer (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2012), 53–63. 39 See Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, Friedrich to Rothko (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). 40 Ibid., 206. 41 See Goethe Institut, Andreas Gursky: Gigantische Bildkonstruktionen: https://www.goethe.de/ de/kul/bku/20374552.html. Accessed August 4, 2020. 42 Within the discursive realm of art criticism, meanwhile, the element of social critique in Gursky’s work is repeatedly emphasized: https://www.dw.com/de/einer-der-teuerstenfotografen-der-welt-andreas-gursky/a-18761638. Accessed August 4, 2020. See also Peter Galassi, Andreas Gursky, exh. cat. The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001). Herein this aspect is cleverly coupled with a wide range of possible connections, in the prudent assumption that such references are dependent on discourse and as such transient. Gursky’s photography obtains its legitimacy as museumworthy through the work’s claim of eternal value, as the artist himself well knows.

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43 Ruskin wrote: “The perception of solid form is entirely a matter of experience. We see nothing but flat colors; and it is only by a series of experiments that we find out that a stain of black or gray indicates the dark side of a solid substance, or that a faint hue indicates that the object in which it appears is far away. The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of color, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify,—as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight. […] Now, a highly accomplished artist has always reduced himself as nearly as possible to this condition of infantine sight.” (John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing [1859], Letter I, Note 1, Reprint: The Project Gutenberg ebook, 2009). On Ruskin, see Wolfgang Kemp, John Ruskin: 1819–1900. Leben und Werk, [1st unchanged reprint] (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2016 [1987]). 44 Cf. Max Imdahl’s important defense of the relevance of Ruskin’s conceptualization: “The critique of Ruskin’s thesis of the innocence of the eye and the natural sight that sees only colors and not bodies or things, formulated by Gombrich but also put forward elsewhere, is not fundamentally incorrect. Nonetheless, in the context of an aesthetic of painting, this critique is […] historically irrelevant. […] And although in our century too—not unlike ­Gombrich—Nelson Goodman disputes the possibility of an unbiased, innocent way of seeing, he does concede that the quest to maintain the innocence of the eye is a useful one, one which leads to new insights and can rescue contemplation [of art] from the worn-out clichés of everyday perception.” (Max Imdahl, Farbe: Kunsttheoretische Reflexionen in Frankreich, 2nd ed. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1988), 25–27). 45 Cf. Bettina Gockel, “Bilder für Blinde – Sehen und Handeln in Malerei, Fotografie und Film: Ein Versuch” (see note 19). 46 Anne Hoormann, “Vorwort,” in idem and Karl Schawelka, eds., Who’s afraid of... Zum Stand der Farbforschung (Weimar: Bauhaus-Universität, 1998), 4–11, here 5. To me, Hoorman’s reference to the “sublime” seems tied to a specific time period, since the postmodernist environment in which Hoorman’s research took place made recourse to Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful to put forward an “explanation” that ultimately was not actually pursued by the artists themselves. The aesthetic of the “sublime” is conceptually and historically encoded and therefore unsuited to the task of explaining art that transcends epochs. Nevertheless, this category is useful in satisfying the desire for explanations, interpretations, and encodings. 47 The term “Ganzfeld” was coined by experimental psychologist Wolfgang Metzger. For more on this concept and its artistic adaptations and analogies in the art of James Turrell and in the theater, see Anne Hoormann, “Schwindel im Ganzfeld und Farb-Täuschung: Wahrnehmungsschwellen im Werk von James Turrell,” in idem and Schawelka (eds.), Who’s afraid of... (see note 46), 336–359, here 340–344. 48 Christoph Amend, “Atelierbesuch bei Andreas Gursky,” ZEITmagazin (April 29, 2010): https://www.zeit.de/2010/18/Atelierbesuch-Andreas-Gursky/. Accessed August 4, 2020. “Andreas Gursky has often described himself as ‘extraterrestrial,’ an ‘alien who ignorantly observes our world.’ He says that he consciously decided to adopt this position as a student at the Kunstakademie. ‘As a budding artist, one asks oneself: where is there still room for me? I decided to occupy this extreme position.’ It is one he has long since become familiar with. The position of outsider, of feeling on one’s own, is something he has known since childhood, and a subject he obviously does not wish to discuss.”

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49 See Bettina Gockel, “Bilder für Blinde – Sehen und Handeln in Malerei, Fotografie und Film: Ein Versuch” (see note 19), as well as Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, The Painters Touch: Boucher, Chardin, ­Fragonard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 165–175. Lajer-Burcharth examines the three self-portraits that Chardin created in the last decade of his life, and sees “blindness” also functioning as a defense against representing the self in the “self-portrait.” In addition, she also rightly asserts that Chardin’s last self-portrait of ca. 1779 contains an “anti-institutional” statement (ibid., 175). 50 Thousands of Talbot’s negatives and prints have been preserved and are now housed in museums and private collections. A catalogue raisonnée can be accessed here: https:// talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. Accessed August 4, 2020. See here for Timothy Potts’s interview with Sugimoto: https://fraenkelgallery.com/timothy-potts-of-the-j-paul-getty-museuminterviews-hiroshi-sugimoto. Accessed August 4, 2020. 51 In this respect, it is important to explore in greater detail the function of the “series” in the context of Sugimoto’s oeuvre. Namely, it is precisely the repetition of the subject of the “ocean” (and/or the sea) which draws the viewer’s attention away from this subject and towards a sheer perceptual experience. Max Imdahl has precisely formulated how this effect works in relation to Monet’s series of haystacks, poplar-lined avenues and the Rouen Cathedral: “The identity of the subject being portrayed fosters interest in the variety of its conditions of appearance, and precisely this interest relativizes the accompanying seman­ ticity of the subject itself.” (Imdahl, Farbe: Kunsttheoretische Reflexionen in Frankreich (see note 44), 20). 52 Introductory visitor’s brochure for the Odawara Art Foundation, Eunora Observatory, ­preface by Hiroshi Sugimoto, n.p. [p. 2]: http://www.odawara-af.com/en/. Accessed August 4, 2020. 53 Diderot’s Selected Writings, selected and edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Lester G. Crocker, translated by Derek Coltman (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), 150. 54 Imdahl, Farbe: Kunsttheoretische Reflexionen in Frankreich (see note 44), 78. 55 Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, [reprint], with a foreword to the new 1990 edition (Frank­­furt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1990 [1962]). 56 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

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Kelley Wilder

Science, Art, and the Business of Color

Color has always stood at the ambiguous crossroads of photography’s two highways, art and science. It was a technological and scientific problem to be solved. In order to envision any sort of solution, though, scientists and photographers needed to agree on the concept of color in photography. It was not clear exactly what color in photography should signify, nor indeed what sort of color would be appropriate, or representative of the world. This essay argues for a complex approach to the subject of color, regarding its history not simply as that of a problem to be solved through science or technology, but as a concept that evolved in the face of competing and sometimes colluding interests from science, art, and business. In the earliest years of experimentation, colors, often referred to as “tints,” were the darks and lights. Reversing them by making negatives into positives, and fixing the tints in this positive order, were problems to be solved, and even impediments to invention and progress. Nicéphore Niépce was not the only inventor to have concentrated on “fixing the colors” of his photographic materials.1 Even fixing them, as important as that was, came second to creating “normal”-looking pictures in the positive, not the negative, by reversing the colors.2 The experiments Niépce and others conducted were informed by the basic assumption that the positive image with its colors in the usual order was the more “true” and natural image. Samuel Morse, on finding that “light produced dark, and dark light, [...] presumed the production of a true image to be impracticable, and gave up the attempt.”3 Sir John Herschel found the effect particularly disturbing in the reproduction of portraits of fair-skinned women.4 Herschel was more optimistic about the ability of the spectrum to reproduce itself, and by July 7, 1839 had made specimens and shared the results with his friends Charles Wheatstone and John Frederick Daniell.5 Herschel, like many early photographers, had no preconceived notion of a “proper” or expected color for a monochromatic photograph. He produced experimental photographs from vegetable matter that took on various colors, including one of a “beautiful rich Crimson tint.”6 In his experiments colors corresponded to chemical actions and reactions, requiring the

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development of a rich vocabulary that could convey information accurately enough to enable the replication of experiments.7 Herschel and others used a vocabulary that did not equate certain wavelengths of light with like photographic colors, but used color description as a register of otherwise invisible chemical reactions. In these early experiments, color was adopted as the visual image of chemistry, accompanied by an expressive vocabulary. For instance, in a letter to Sir John Herschel in February 1839, Talbot couched his experimental results with “Ferrocyanate of Potash” (potassium ferrocyanide) in terms of color. Merely dipping his photogenic drawing in the solution had no effect. But dipping it in, then washing it with water partly succeeded in fixing the photograph, turning it “an iron grey in sunshine.” Soaking the photograph in the solution for two hours was successful, “but the ground change[d] from black to rich yellowish brown.” “How do [these results] agree with yours?” he asked Herschel.8 Robert Hunt, writing to Herschel with his own photographic experiments, used very similar color descriptions to signify chemical changes.9 Such early notes on the invention of photography represent color as an important experimental concept that crept into all aspects of monochromatic photography. Neither Hunt nor Talbot were concerned with the color of individual objects in the world and their registration in a similar color with photographic chemistry. Rather, color was a way of interpreting real time chemical changes, and allowing others to replicate them. It was not a cosmetic addition to an already whole photography, a coating added afterwards, but an integral part of the interpretation of what photography might be. The highly subjective description of color in these circumstances required a practiced eye, a shared knowledge of botany, minerals, chemicals and light, and above all individual judgment. In the intervening years since these first forays into using photographic color, the notion of a photograph’s color has slowly but almost inexorably become linked to the question of photography’s ability to tell the truth about nature. In an early and influential essay about science, art, and photographic color, Lynch and Edgerton identified color as a place where the role of judgment and intention could be found in scientific photographs.10 It was one of the many avenues of investigation that had been instigated by the 1960s shift in history and philosophy of science toward seeing scientific facts as constructed rather than discovered, that is, as social and cultural rather than natural. So practices such as the creation of experiments, the prosecution of observations, the communication of knowledge, and eventually the making of images became a locus of investigation. One aspect of these investigations took in science and art, asking, among other things, how much anyone could talk about aesthetics or form or pictorial judgment in relation to scientific images, without ascribing to scientists the same aims as artists. To answer the question, Lynch and others could have used form, or pictorial composition, but instead they chose to engage with the science/art question via photographic color. The scientists who were their subjects

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(they used ethnomethodology, embedded in a laboratory, conducting interviews with scientists) concurred that colored, “[p]retty pictures were said to be important, not simply for personal diversion and popularized display, but for promoting astronomical research.”11 Color thus appeared to be an easier place to interrogate—a place where judgment and intention appeared to be easier to follow, and where it seemed less “dangerous” to talk about science and art and the construction of knowledge. In some ways photographic color is where the “two cultures” discussion has also remained, stagnating into an often-polarized discussion about “real” and “false” color, forever aimed at the representation of the external shape of things. Allowing color to inhabit this space without questioning how the concept of color has changed over time is a deeply flawed approach. In particular, it neglects the intense business culture into which photographic color was introduced and thrived, at a time when its promise as a scientific tool appeared limitless. The connection of science to art at the nexus of color was bolstered by clever business practices actively promoted by companies at the epicenter of color photographic production. The remainder of this essay sketches out a few ideas for the consideration of economic conditions as a backdrop for a discussion of the concept of photographic color at the boundary between art and science. A good example of the pervasiveness of the business side of color photography can be found in the issue of Camera Work devoted to color. In 1908, Edward Steichen introduced the main article on color with this paragraph: “During the last twenty years we have been periodically informed by the daily press that color photography was an accomplished fact. Every time some excitable individual got a little chemical discoloration on his photographic plate or paper, the news was sent sizzling over the globe and color photography was announced in big type, corporations were formed, and good friends were given another chance to invest in a sure thing. As usual, the public soon yawned at this perpetual cry of ‘wolf,’ but somehow capital kept up its faith. It was only a year ago that a very prominent French financier came to me, breathless with excitement over a few very good three-color carbon prints—a clever English shark was trying to interest capital in his ‘discovery.’ Millions have surely been buried in fake schemes, to say nothing of the millions spent in earnest, but commercially fruitless, research.”12 Commerce and color are strongly represented in this paragraph, and placed in close proximity. “Millions have surely been buried,” he writes, “ […] in earnest, but commercially fruitless, research.” No doubt Steichen was thinking of the many discoveries that never evolved, like the new color process by the Abbé A. Graby, who enclosed some samples of his color photographic process on paper in a letter to the president of the Académie des Sciences in 1896. Although details of his process were much circulated,

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discussed, and published about through 1900, no commercial process was forthcoming.13 His attempt closely followed revelations by Gabriel Lippmann of a most extraordinary process of photographic color by interference, which generated considerable excitement, but remained a theoretical triumph rather than a commercial success.14 Steichen’s commentary has more to offer than the criticism of lost capital. It raises the question of the source of such vast amounts of lost capital. To speculate about the potential investors, it is worth paging further in this issue of Camera Work. Toward the end—in the unnumbered pages at the back of the magazine—appears a beautifully constructed missive on the goods advertised. “First class goods only” it reads, “are advertised in Camera Work.” Just as Alfred Stieglitz was known for his exacting aesthetic standards in editing the photography in the Journal, his fellow photo-secessionist Edward Steichen, no less the perfectionist, produced and designed Camera Work, extending all aspects of aesthetic rigor even into the selection of advertisers and the design of their advertisements. The page exhorting the support of advertisers in the magazine is followed, perhaps unsurprisingly for a magazine issue dedicated to color, by an advertisement for the new Lumière autochrome plates (fig. 1). The autochrome had been commercially available for less than a year at the time of printing. Products like the autochrome, a direct-color process on glass, were no doubt the reward for “capital keeping its faith” in the endeavors toward color photography. In this highly commercialized atmosphere, where companies and financiers spent millions for an outcome that was not only “earnest” but commercially viable, it seemed that someone already knew how lucrative color could become. How did they know this? And who were the financiers who were so interested? Many historical narratives of business and color photography are dominated by the stories of Agfacolor and Kodachrome, and focus predominantly on the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. The time preceding these decades primarily deals with accounts of individual inventors of largely idiosyncratic methods, some more theoretical than others. The biographical accounts of James Clerk Maxwell, Louis Ducos du Hauron, Frederick Ives, and others drive the largely technical historical narrative of improvement in color photography. None of these stories of individuals can account for Steichen’s squandered millions. What is seldom discussed in photographic history is the extent of the involvement of photographic innovators with the synthetic dye industry. By 1908, when this advertisement was printed, photography had already been “colored” for more than two decades with aniline dyes, developed in a rapidly expanding and lucrative industry of color. The industry had its beginnings more than thirty years before Steichen’s article. In 1873, Hermann Wilhelm Vogel published the first of a series of papers on what are now called “optical sensitizers” for photographic films.15 An optical sensitizer is an additive applied directly to the gelatin that extends the sensitivity of the silver salts in the emulsion. Silver iodide, silver chloride, and silver bromide, the three most com-

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1: Advertisement for Lumière Autochrome plates in Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly, 1908, Vol. 22, p. [59], courtesy University Library Heidelberg.

monly used silver salts in photographic experiments from 1800–1870, are only partially sensitive to the solar spectrum. While each one differs slightly, the greatest sensitivity for all three lies in the ultra-violet, blue, and violet end of the spectrum. Red, yellow, and green areas of the spectrum had a minimal effect if any at all. The rendering of such disparate colors as green, red, and yellow in the same dark tone in the finished photograph led photographers to experiment with various additives that would enhance sensitivity in these areas. Often, however, substances had a local effect, enhancing one but not another area of sensitivity, as seen in figure 2, and slowing exposure time.16 Naphthalene red and methylrosaniline picrate, the two substances Vogel used in this experiment, were substances relatively new to the aniline dye market in the 1870s. The sensationalized story of aniline dye, and of William Perkins, who

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2: Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, Albumen print showing the effects of the solar spectrum with normal and colored silver ­bromide, 1874, The Albertina Museum, Vienna, on permanent loan from “Höhere Graphische Bundes-, Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt.”

isolated mauvine in 1856, is well known and recently served as the basis of a bestselling novel by Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. By the 1870s aniline dyes were being manufactured in the UK, France, Switzerland, and Germany, with new aniline colors appearing on the market every year. Among the companies specializing in color synthesis are some very familiar names in photographic history: Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation (Agfa), Badische Anilin-und Soda-Fabrik (BASF), Gesellschaft für Chemische Industrie in Basel (Ciba), Geigy, Bayer, and Hoechst. These companies formed the backbone of the international, and incredibly lucrative, synthetic dye industry. Aniline colors were used in the clothing industry but also in food, wax, and any number of conceivable commercial objects.17 Comparing coal tar, from which aniline colors are derived, to the prolific uses of the palm tree, beetroot, and sugar cane, Punch magazine’s short poem “Beautiful Tar” is both a celebration: “Oil, and ointment, and wax, and wine, And the lovely colours called aniline; You can make anything, from a salve to a star, If you only know how to, from black Coal-tar.” and a cautionary tale of worldwide commercial enterprise:

Science, Art, and the Business of Color

“Triumph, O Tar! Stuff half divine! The world’s whole interests soon will twine Around thine essence the subtlest far, Tar of the Gas-works, black Coal-tar – Tar of the Gas-works, black Coal-Tar!”18 Vogel’s discovery of aniline dye as a sensitizing agent in the 1870s coincided with the introduction of gelatin dry plates to the market.19 Vogel had used a dry collodion recipe for his initial experiments, but the results were inconsistent. In the 1880s, several useful dyes were discovered and adopted into gelatin dry plates. These familiar names— eosin, cyanin, and erythrocin—were soon common additives to so-called “ortho” plates. They not only lengthened the spectral sensitivity, but the colorant acted as an anti-halation layer, partly preventing the halos that occurred around particularly bright objects, such as windows in photographs of interiors. The photographic “color” in which Agfa and other firms were investing was not just a visible equivalent to the natural world, like the autochromes that were the subject of Steichen’s article. It was an investment in the very fabric of photography, and in a chemical industry that looked set to produce fortunes to rival those from the sugar cane industry. In this way, the concept of “color” in photography in the last two decades of the nineteenth century continued to be linked to the chemical reactions of photography. However, these were not measured in language that spoke of color. Instead they were wholly invisible, and produced effects that were measured in sensitivity and in the tonal rendering of objects. “Color,” then, acted to improve photographic recording in what was considered “natural” tonality, replicating the sensitivity of the human eye. But it also allowed photography to be tailor-made for other scientific purposes, especially in the area of reconnaissance and astronomy, where wavelength-specific photography was of particular use. The companies that produced dyes were well aware of the growth of the photographic market. And Agfa was not the only aniline dye company to become a major photographic supplier, although it was by far the most visible.20 The companies investing in this field had an incentive to sell not just colored plates, in the form of more sensitive plates, but to sell the concept of color as the next natural photographic tool of great potential. They did this through exchange, exhibition, and publication. At the yearly exhibitions of large societies such as the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, it became more and more common for photographic companies to enter exhibits.21 By 1911 Ilford Ltd. had been exhibiting its wares for several years, always with an Ilford representative to answer the questions of interested potential customers. They were perhaps competing with their rival, the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company (later Kodak), which had begun exhibiting in 1885, but had expanded its exhibitions in 1888 with the Kodak no. 1 and continued every year after that, with

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first cameras and then photographic prints from different Eastman cameras and Eastman films.22 George Eastman was in turn competing with earlier entrants to the market, Wratten and Wainwright, a company he later purchased, which had exhibited photographic wares since at least the 1850s, along with well known companies like the London Stereoscopic Company, Autotype Company, Berlin Photographic Company, and others. Color-sensitized plates began regularly appearing in these exhibitions around the last years of the 1880s. In 1888, H. W. Vogel and his son Ernst exhibited

3: Edwin E. Jelley, p-Aminoazobenzene, orthoscopic, 1932, color transparency (autochrome), 10.8 × 8.2 × 0.3 cm, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.

color sensitized plates, and in the following years, many companies and individuals such as Dallmeyer, E. Sanger Shepherd, and Frederick Ives exhibited innovations in these and other sorts of color plates, some using aniline colors.23 Dissemination through exhibition in scientific and technical sections, or later, after the phrase was invented, the “applied” photography section, situated color firmly in the arena of scientific discovery.

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4: Edwin E. Jelley, Orpheus in the Underworld, ca. 1950, dye imbibition print, 44.2 × 33.6 cm (mount: 51 × 40.8 cm), George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.

Individual scientists working on scientific and technical subjects were not restricted to scientific displays. Their photographs could be shown with more poetic titles, and in places like the Oval Table Society in New York, known for its pictorialist displays. Photographers like Edwin Jelley, a Kodak Scientist and member of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), regularly exhibited their work as both science and art. For Jelley, a direct positive glass slide of aminoazobenzene (also a derivative of coal

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tar) taken in ca. 1935 under polarized light might just as easily carry the title “Orpheus in the Underworld” on a print from the same slide (figs. 3, 4). Jelley pioneered the use of a grating microspectrograph in his work for Kodak in microchemistry.24 No clear divide seems to have been drawn between his scientific work and his exhibition print, although the use of a myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses is perhaps suggestive of his opinion that they were linked entities. Jelley wrote several articles about photomicrography and aesthetics in which he drew distinctions between those who practice art with the microscope and photography and those who are scientists using photography with the microscope.25 His own reflections neglect the category in which scientific color photomicrographs were repurposed as artworks, given literary titles, and divided from their scientific roots. Although color was a minor novelty in exhibitions before 1915, in the inter-war period, especially the 1930s, a certain shift is detectable in the treatment and meaning of scientific color photography.26 In 1937 the Photographic Society of America, Technical Section held an international exhibition in Rochester, NY from March 15 to April 3. According to the Journal of the PSA, nearly 30,000 people visited the exhibition in this short period and a further 600 at a private showing on March 14. The main part of the exhibition was hung in the Art Gallery of the centrally located Rundel Library. The sections included: I. Color Processes; II. Astronomy, Meteorology; Aerial Photography; III. Photomicrography; IV. Radiography; V. Documentary Photography, including Criminology and Investigation; VI. High Speed Photography; VII. Stereoscopic Photography; VIII. Photography in Physics and Chemistry; IX. Natural History; X. Press Photography, Phototelegraphy, & Miscellaneous Applications. If there was any doubt about the performance of color in the show, the halls between rooms were lined with lit panel cases containing color and astronomical exhibits. Including the color process prints, the transparencies, and demonstrations of color processes by Defender, Agfa, Kodak, and Walt Disney Studios, more than 150 of the exhibits were color. Most of the large photographic corporations were represented, alongside research labs in other areas: Vivex, Bell Laboratories, MIT, Acme Newspictures, National Geographic Society, Mount Wilson Observatory, US Army Air Corps, The London Times, and more.27 Skepticism about the value of photographic color’s usefulness in the sciences is now largely taken for granted. For a time, however, in the heyday of color innovation from 1900 to the 1950s, the possibilities of color appeared endless. Implicitly inscribed in the many “innovations” was the message that photography was rapidly changing, much manipulated, and required special interpretation and constant reinvention. One would think then, that these sorts of images would have had very little circula-

Science, Art, and the Business of Color

5: Adolf Marfaing, Picture #8, Hemangioma (Tumor), Buphthalmos (Cornea Globosa), verso image showing Oval Table Society stamp, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.

tion, being directed solely at other professional scientists. Many of the prints appear, however, to have achieved much wider distribution. The backs of the boards of the remaining photographs in the George Eastman Museum show several exhibition stamps. The most prevalent are those from the exhibition in Los Angeles of 1938.28 There are other stamps, however, some for the Royal Photographic Society Exhibitions both before and after 1937, some for the Oval Table Society, and others for salons in Lake Charles, or other regional destinations (fig. 5). The broad reach of such exhibitions was no doubt attractive to companies like Agfa and Kodak, which could take the opportunity to sell new products, and to portray those products as belonging to cutting-edge scientific research. Even in the sections where monochromatic photography was more prevalent, images were made with experimental photographic materials

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such as new films, new printing techniques, and new cameras. There are examples of high-speed photography, stroboscopic imagery, stereo movies, flexichrome, wash-off relief, experimental Kodachrome, and early Transmission Electron Microscope images, to name a few. What the 1937 exhibit made visible was a much less tangible but critical argument about the emerging role of color in photographic science and stateof-the-art photography. It is important to remember just how these photographic representations were “constructed to be realistic” to use Lynch’s term from 1991.29 They were not realistic in the way that they corresponded one to one with the items they depicted, the socalled indexicality argument much discussed since the 1970s. These photographic realities were constructed in part by the legacy of the photographic science/scientific photography exhibition—a social, cultural, and sometimes geographical alignment. It was no accident that Rochester was the site of this exhibition. It was home to a number of research labs in addition to Kodak. The University of Rochester, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb, and others provided not only exhibitors but also an audience and perhaps a market for the innovations on show. The largest proportion of exhibitors came from industry—either the photographic industry with its research labs or from the medical, steel, coal, and fashion industries. Photography exhibitions were big— and in this case, colorful—business. The dissemination of such a strong message around color, business, and photography faded but did not disappear in the 1940s. During the war and its aftermath, photographic companies reorganized, and entered perhaps a different playing field of diversification—itself a theme for another essay. It was in the regrouping of Agfa in the 1950s, after having lost many of its proprietary patents and much of its market share to Kodak and other competitors, that the concept of color as a link between photography, science, and business emerged again strongly in the pages of its inhouse magazine. A close look at Photographie und Wissenschaft (Photography and Science), a journal produced by Agfa in the 1950s and 1960s, provides a compelling picture of what color had become at the crossroads of science, business, and photography. In the opening words of the first issue of the first year of the journal (1952), one of the editors—Wolfgang Eichler (an Agfa engineer who edited the journal throughout its run)—set out the place of the journal. It followed, he claimed, the Zeitschrift für Angewandte Photographie (Journal of Applied Photography), which had run until 1943. Photographie und Wissenschaft, continued the editor, would be an “organ for scientific work, in which photographic methods formed a significant component.” Not only would the new journal look for excellent examples of image-making in the service of science, but it would also republish work that had been previously published in circumstances where the original images could not be printed well (or at all). All these points are interesting aspects that should be investigated, but the last statement that Eichler made is the most important here. He refers to the circulation of the journal,

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6:. Advertisement for Agfacolor in Photographie und Wissenschaft, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1955), back cover.

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and the details of circulation tell much about the concept of color in this essay. He stated: “The publishing of ‘Photographie und Wissenschaft’ is made possible by Agfa, and is a gift to German universities and research institutes. It will therefore be made available at no cost to all institutions and individual researchers who express their interest in it. The published articles will be appropriately compensated.”30 Not only did Agfa pay for the printing costs and presumably the costs of editing and sending the journals out to numerous institutions, they also paid the authors for their articles. It was an extraordinary expense, even at a time when the house organ and the employee magazine were enjoying rising popularity. Not, however, so extraordinary if we consider the marketing potential of the journal. In-house journals or house organs, as they are sometimes called, are communication devices, responsible for either communication between employees and the company, or communication between the company and the outside world. Photographie und Wissenschaft existed to communicate a very specific message about Agfa to the research world. In its pages, it promoted the notion of color as a scientific tool, and promoted the research done using color photography. Externally it linked scientific color with Agfa color products. Each rear page was carefully designed to show the link explicitly, usually designed with leading lines drawn to connect color, Agfa, and some sign of science like a photomicrograph or minerals or a dragonfly (figs. 6, 7). This sort of advertising would only be useful if widely disseminated. The tactic for dissemination appears to have been to send it to well-known university libraries and national libraries internationally as well as to most libraries in German-speaking countries. Today copies can still be found in libraries in such locations as: University of Cambridge, British Library, National Libraries of Scotland, Staatsbibliothek Berlin, German universities such as Dresden, Heidelberg and Leipzig, the Free University of Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Library, the University of Paris-South (Sciences), the Bibliothèque Nationale, the University Libraries of Basel and Bern, the ULB Brussels, Eastman Kodak, the New York Public Library, and many more. Many more copies appear to have made their way into private hands.31 To make the articles desirable, and perhaps to foster interest in owning the journal and consulting it and perhaps citing it, Agfa had two tactics—it hired celebrity science photographers and published work by them, and it reprinted wellknown work with better or sometimes color plates, when these had been omitted from the initial publication. One such celebrity photographer was Fritz Brill. In 1950 Brill had established the Institut für Photoanalyse (Institute for Photoanalysis), from which he made photographs and films for advertising companies and the scientific industry. He was well

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7: Advertisement for Agfacolor in Photographie und Wissenschaft, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1953), back cover.

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known as an artist and as a cameraman, and won the Deutscher Filmpreis (German Film Prize) for “best color cameraman” for the film Schöpfung ohne Ende (a color film from the Color Laboratory of Bayer AG) in 1957. In 1960, alongside Albert RengerPatzsch, Brill was awarded the Cultural Prize of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (the German Photographic Society), placing him in a long line of luminaries in the photographic world, such as Helmut Gernsheim, Lennart Nilsson, Cornell Capa, William Klein, Harold Edgerton, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Gisele Freund. It was an opportunity for Agfa to increase the circulation of their journal, and in 1960, they commissioned an article in volume 9 issue 2, and devoted the back cover to Brill’s work. They took the opportunity to name him as the developer of a new area of studies, “Optical Photoanalyses,” an area that they equated with “Neue Sachlichkeit” or “New Objectivity” as it is commonly translated, by proximity.32 By doing so, the editors of Photographie und Wissenschaft and perhaps also members of Agfa’s marketing department equated a photographic method of analysis with a photographic movement clearly associated with realist artists like Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann. In this way, science and art were brought together, in a journal devoted to selling color for Agfa. Here the concept of photographic color is not directly tied to a particular outcome or chemical reaction. Instead it is, in the journal, the product for sale. It was a late attempt to resurrect the optimism of the 1930s, when color seemed poised at the frontier of science and art. By the end of the 1960s the journal had folded, and analog color photography gave way to increasingly digital techniques. Although ultimately unsuccessful, Agfa’s support of analog photographic color as an analytic tool was a concept borne of the business possibilities of photographic color, or color in the fabric of photography. Clearly, photographic color has never been far from either science or business. Steichen’s millions did not necessarily come from a single mysterious backer of individual inventors. It was likely a reference to the global chemical industry in which photography was entwined. Foregrounding the embedded nature of photographic innovation within the synthetic chemistry industry clarifies not only who had such faith in color photography, but also why. There were millions, in fact billions, to be made. The individual scientists who used the language of color to communicate realtime chemical changes in the 1840s could not have imagined that only a decade later a global chemical market would emerge that radically changed the relationship of photography to color—from one of scientific experiment to one of global commodity. How important this subject is to the history of photography can be seen in the durability of the global market for color chemistry in direct comparison to photography. For every Kodak that declares bankruptcy, there is an Eastman Chemical Company that continues to forge ahead into the foreseeable future.

Science, Art, and the Business of Color

Notes   1 N. Niépce to Claude Niépce, April 1, 1816, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce Letters 1816–1817 (Rouen: Pavillon de la Photographie, 1973), 13–15. “[...] mais il faut parvenier à fixer la couleur [...].” This letter is number 243 in the Niépce Correspondence Online at http://www.photo-museum.org/niepce-letters-documents-online. Accessed January 19, 2019.   2 N. Niépce to Claude Niépce, May 19, 1816. Letter 249 in Niépce Correspondence (see note 1).   3 Samuel Morse, The New York Observer, April 20, 1839. This is commonly quoted as one of the first accounts of the daguerreotype to reach American cities. The dating of his experiments remains uncertain, and has been detailed by Geoffrey Batchen in “Early Photographic Experiments of Samuel Morse,” History of Photography 15, no. 1, Spring 1991: 37–42.   4 Sir John Herschel, notebook entry February 14, 1839, W0022 Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre (HRHRC).   5 Herschel’s experiments on the spectrum are recorded throughout July in Diary W0022 at the HRHRC. On July 8, 1839 he writes that he shared his results and distributed samples to “Daniell, Wheatstone, Baily &c,” leaving the other recipients to the imagination.   6 Herschel, notebook entry for April 19, 1839. W0022 HRHRC.   7 Peter Geimer among others has remarked that photography began in color, taking notice of Talbot’s entry in The Pencil of Nature about color in early photogenic drawings. But he asserts also that the color served no mimetic function. I disagree in part, as they did serve to create a visual image for a chemical reaction. As a measure of experimental function, as a method of replication of chemical processes, the colors are tied quite exactly to the real world of chemistry. Peter Geimer, “The Colors of Evidence: Picturing the Past in Photography and Film,” in Kelley Wilder and Gregg Mitman, eds., Documenting the World (Chicago: Chicago ­University Press, 2016), 45–64.   8 H. F. Talbot to J. F. W. Herschel, February 18, 1839. Original letter in the Royal Society collection, Document Number 03811 in The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot: www.foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk. Accessed August 15, 2017.   9 For more on Robert Hunt’s experiments, see James Ryan, “Placing Early Photography: The Work of Robert Hunt in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in History of Photography 41, no. 4 (November 2017): 343–361. I would like to thank James Ryan for allowing me to read his manuscript before publication. 10 Samuel Edgerton and Michael Lynch, “Aesthetics and Digital Image Processing: Representational Craft in Contemporary Astronomy,” in Gordon Fyfe and John Law, eds., Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations (London: Routledge, 1988), 184–220. 11 Ibid., 192. 12 Eduard Steichen, Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly, vol. 22 (1908), 17. See the digital version of Camera Work: https://www.arthistoricum.net/en/subjects/editions/cw/. 13 Graby sent two samples of his process to the French Académie des Sciences on July 9, 1896, where they remain enclosed in their original letter at the Archive of the Institute de France. An article appeared “Nouvelle méthode de photographie des couleurs, par M. L’Abbe A. Graby” in the Comptes Rendus, and his work seems to have been well circulated at the time in the scientific magazines of 1896–1897. One such article is “La photographie des couleurs sur papier” in Frédéric Dillaye, Les Nouveautés photographiques: complément annuel à la théorie, la pratique et l’art en photographie (Paris: Librarie illustrée, 1897), 127–129. 14 Gabriel Lippmann announced his color process in 1891, “La photographie des couleurs,” Comptes Rendus 112, 274–275, and continued to expand his work through the 1890s. The theory

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was followed up with photographic experiments from Eduard Valenta, Richard Neuhauss, Herman Krone, Herbert Ives, and others. Lippmann plates were marketed by the German company Zeiss, but there is little evidence that the process was commercially successful. 15 H. W. Vogel, “Über die Lichtempfindlichkeit des Bromsilbers für die sogenannten chemisch unwirksamen Farben,” Annalen der Physik 150: 453–459. These results were also immediately reported in the English photographic press in “On the sensitiveness of bromide of silver to the so-called chemically active colours,” Photographic News 17: 589–590 and reprinted in Vogel’s magazine Die Photographische Mitteilungen 10: 233–237. 16 Panchromatic films required the additional innovation of layer technology that kept several layers of differently-dyed silver salts separate through exposure and processing. 17 For more on the raw materials of the photographic trade see Michelle Henning, Photography The Unfettered Image (London: Routledge, 2018), chapter 5. I am grateful to the author for allowing me access to the manuscript before publication. See also Kelley Wilder, ed., “Photography in the Marketplace,” PhotoResearcher 25 (2016), articles by Kim Timby and Clara von Waldthausen. 18 “Beautiful Tar. Song of an Enthusiastic Scientist,” Punch 95 (July 7, 1888): 123. 19 Although Richard Leach Maddox first described his dry plate recipe in an article in the ­British Journal of Photography in 1871 (579:18, June 1871, vii), the business of selling these ­plates in the market grew into a viable industry between 1873 and 1878. Michael Pritchard, The Development and Growth of British Photographic Manufacturing and Retailing 1839–1914 (PhD Dissertation, De Montfort University, 2010), 114–115. 20 This essay only addresses the color side of photographic industries. It is important to remember that they also sold great quantities of chemicals such as developers and fixers. 21 Although I have used the available databases, which cover only the UK activities and exhibitions at present, there is evidence in the archives that similar patterns could be found in other European and North American countries with strong photographic manufacturing, such as Germany, France, Canada, and the USA. For more information on exhibitors, see Exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society 1870–1915 at http://erps.dmu.ac.uk/exhibit_details. php?etid=127033. Accessed January 19, 2019. 22 Using a keyword search for Eastman Company and Kodak in Exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society 1870–1915 at http://erps.dmu.ac.uk/exhibit_details.php?etid=127033. Accessed January 19, 2019. 23 Ibid., keyword search for Vogel, 1888. 24 Communication No. H533 from the Kodak Research Laboratories. Based on a talk given to the RPS in London, October 31, 1933. 25 E. E. Jelley, “Photomicrography,” The Photographic Journal: Including the Journal and Transactions of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain LXXII (1932): 438–439; E. E. Jelley, “Photomicrography,” The Photographic Journal: Including the Journal and Transactions of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain LXXIV (1934): 492–493. 26 Few remnants, aside from catalogs and installation photographs, exist. However, in the George Eastman Museum almost 200 exhibition boards containing exhibition prints have so far been unearthed. I would like to thank Ross Napper and Rachel Andrews for their help with matching up prints from the corners of the collection. 27 Catalog of First International Exhibition of Scientific and Applied Photography, Rochester Technical section, Photographic Society of America, 1937. Catalog property of George Eastman Museum. 28 The PSA exhibition was meant to travel, and venues across the USA from Boston to Seattle were planned, but it is possible that only the Los Angeles venue went ahead.

Science, Art, and the Business of Color

29 Michael Lynch, “Science in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Moral and Epistemic Rela­ tions between Diagrams and Photographs,” Biology and Philosophy 6, no. 2 (1991): 205–226. 30 “Die Herausgabe von ‘Photographie und Wissenschaft’ erfolgt durch die Agfa und ist ein Geschenk an die deutschen Hochschulen und Forschungsinstitute. Sie wird daher kostenlos allen Instituten und Einzelforschern zur Verfügung gestellt werden, welche ihr Interesse dafür bekunden. Die veröffentlichten Beiträge werden angemessen honoriert.” Wolfgang Eichler, Photographie und Wissenschaft (AGFA: Leverkusen-Bayerwerk, 1952), 3. Translation by the author. 31 Photographs in this essay are made from the author’s copy, which came from the private library of a doctor. 32 “Verleihung des Kulturpreises der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie 1960,” Photographie und Wissenschaft 2, no. 9, (1960): 43.

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List of Contributors

Charlotte Cotton Charlotte Cotton is an independent writer and curator.  She has held positions as curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum; curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and head of programming at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. She has been curator-in-residence at the Katonah Museum of Art, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Metabolic Studio, Los Angeles, and the California Museum of Photography, Riverside. Cotton has written and edited numerous influential books, including Imperfect Beauty: The Making of Contemporary Fashion Photographs (2000), Guy Bourdin (2003), The Photograph as Contemporary Art (2004), Photography is Magic (2015), Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (2018) and Fashion Image Revolution (2018).

Hans Danuser Hans Danuser is a Swiss artist and photographer, whose works have been showcased in numerous international solo and group exhibitions. In 2009, he was the first visiting artist at the Center for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography at the Department of Art History, University of Zurich. In 2009/10, he held a position as visiting professor at ETH Zurich. In 2014, the book Neuerfindung der Fotografie: Hans Danuser – Gespräche, Materialien, Analysen (ed. by Hans Danuser and Bettina Gockel) was published in the publication series “Studies in Theory and History of Photography.” Danusers works are represented in public and private collections, including in the Museum of Fine Art Zurich, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, New York, the Howard Stein collection in New York, the George Reinhart collection in Winterthur and Walter A. Bechtler collection in Uster.

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Bettina Gockel Bettina Gockel is Professor and Chair for the History of Fine Arts and Director of the Center for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography at the Department of Art History, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Before joining the Faculty of Arts at the University of Zurich, she was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, School of Historical Studies, and a fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Bettina Gockel is author of Die Pathologisierung des Künstlers. Künstlerlegenden der Moderne (2010) and editor of the publication series “Theory and History of Photography” (Berlin: De Gruyter) as well as “Art & Photography” (Heidelberg: UB Heidelberg). Please see the following link for a complete publication list and CV: https://www.khist.uzh.ch/en/chairs/bildende.html.

Raymond Meier Raymond Meier was born in Switzerland in 1957. He began his photography career in 1972 with an apprenticeship at the Zurich Art School. At the age of twenty he opened his first studio in Zurich and began to apply his conceptual thinking and photographic experimentation to the field of commercial image-making. In 1986, he moved his studio to New York City where he has been a major influencer upon publications at points of innovative change including Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and The New York Times. Meier’s long lasting relationships with major fashion, jewelry and cosmetic brands have shaped their visual identities for three decades. Throughout his career, he has also been dedicated to an independent photographic practice. With his intense understanding and constant experimentation with the properties of analog and digital photography, Meier articulates the complexity and subtleties of the medium. 

Kim Timby Kim Timby is an independent photography historian based in Paris, where she teaches at the École du Louvre and works as a curator for a private collection specialized in nineteenth-century travel and ethnographic photography. Her research explores the cultural history of photographic technologies. She is interested in what motivates the elaboration of specific forms of photography and in the social, artistic and scientific practices that structure their reception and development. She is the author of 3D and Animated Lenticular Photography: Between Utopia and Entertainment (2015), and has contributed essays to edited volumes including Between Still and Moving Images (2012), Getting the Picture. The History and Visual Culture of the News (2015), and Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century: Towards an Integrated History (2018). Previously, she has worked as a curator at the Musée Carnavalet, Paris, and at the Nicéphore Niépce photography museum in Chalon-sur-Saône.

List of Contributors

Tanya Sheehan Tanya Sheehan is the William R. Kenan Jr. Associate Professor of Art at Colby College. She is the author of  Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011) and Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (2018). Her edited books include Photography, History, Difference (2014), Photography and Its Origins (2015; co-edited with Andrés Zervigón), Grove Art Guide to Photography (2017), and Photography and Migration (2018). She serves as executive editor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art Journal.

Blake Stimson Blake Stimson is a professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has written for Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Artforum, October, Texte zur Kunst, Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, New Left Review, Tate Papers, Études photographiques, Philosophy and Photography, nonsite.org and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, among others and his work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Polish, Serbian, Chinese, Korean and Farsi. He is the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (2006), Citizen Warhol (2014) and co-editor of five volumes that focus on various junctures of art and political subjectivity. He is currently working on a book with co-author Andrew Hemingway, provisionally titled Seeing like a State, that focuses on the lost political aesthetic of photographer Paul Strand.

Kelley Wilder Kelley Wilder is Professor and Director of the Photographic History Research Centre, at the De Montfort University in Leicester. Her research focuses on the photographic history of Europe and North America, visual culture of western science, material culture of photography, scientific photography, museum and archive studies, photography and Digital Humanities. Kelley Wilder is the author of Photography and Science (2009) and co-editor with Gregg Mitman of Documenting the World: Film, Photography and the Scientific Record (2016). She is also guest editor of the PhotoResearcher’s Special Issue Photography in the Marketplace (2016). She has contributed a large number of essays to edited volumes such as Photography and its Origins (ed. by Tanya Sheehan, Andrés Zervigón) and Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History as well as to the journals History of Photography, Fotogeschichte and Aperture. Wilder has been Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and was Dr. Carlo Fleischmann Visiting Professor in Photography at the Centre for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography in Zurich. 

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Deborah Willis Deborah Willis is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social & Cultural, Africana Studies. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, the photographic history of Slavery and Emancipation; contemporary women photographers and beauty. She received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and was a Richard D. Cohen Fellow in African and African American Art, Hutchins Center, Harvard University and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Professor Willis received the NAACP Image Award in 2014 for her co-authored book Envisioning Emancipation. Other notable projects include her essay on photography in The Image of the Black in Western Art, and her publications The Black Female Body A Photographic History (2002), Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers - 1840 to the Present (2000), Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (2009), NAACP Image Award Literature Winner, and Black Venus 2010: They Called Her ‘Hottentot (2010). Apart from being a scholar of the medium, Professor Willis is also a photographer herself. Her photographic works have been included in exhibitions in the United States, Portugal, Ghana, and Canada.

Thanks

First I would like to thank everyone who participated in the preparations for and realization of the international conference “The Colors of Photography”: Dr. Nanni Baltzer (†), Department of Art History, University of Zurich; Prof. Dr. Michael Hengartner, President, University of Zurich; Prof. Dr. Andreas H. Jucker, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Scienes, University of Zurich; Dr. Sophie Junge, Department of Art History, University of Zurich; Stella Jungmann, M. A., Department of Art History, University of Zurich; Hans P. Kraus Jr., Fine Photographs, New York; Dr. Albert Lutz, Director, Museum Rietberg, Zurich; Dr. Patrizia Munforte, Department of Art History, University of Zurich; Thomas Keller, lic. phil., Department of Art History, University of Zurich; Katharina Haack, M. A., Department of Art History, University of Zurich; PD Dr. Roger Fayet, Director, Swiss Institute for Art Research, Zurich; Martin Steinbrück, Berlin; Roger Salloch, Paris; Kim Timby, Ph. D., Paris; Tanya Sheehan, Ph. D., William R. Kenan Jr. Professor, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Blake Stimson, Ph. D., Professor of Contemporary Art, Critical Theory, and the History of Photography, University of Illinois, Chicago; Ph. D. Kelley Wilder, Director, Photographic History Research Centre, De Monfort University, Leicester; Sally Stein, Ph. D., Prof. emer., University of California, Irvine, and Deborah Willis, Ph. D., Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts of New York University. – Dr. Sophie Junge took care of numerous details during the time leading up to the conference and was supported by Dr. Nanni Baltzer, both of whom were important partners in making conceptional and practical decisions. A very special thanks goes to the Director of the Museum Rietberg, Dr. Albert Lutz, who made it possible for the conference kickoff to take place in the auditorium of the Park-Villa Rieter, followed by a convivial culinary reception in the Villa Wesendonck, an excellent start to the event. Furthermore, it was a special honor that the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Prof. Dr. Andreas H. Jucker and University of Zurich President Prof. Dr. Michael Hengartner took the time to welcome the international guests and the audience on each of the conference’s two days. Communication went smoothly thanks to

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Thanks

the simultaneous interpreter Annette von Lerber from avl dolmetscher gmbh. The conference’s main program took place at the University of Zurich, in a venue decorated with an elegant bouquet of flowers taken from the university’s nursery. Mensa Service provided optimal catering for all the guests, with an informal lunch, plenty of coffee and snacks. During the breaks, the book table with publications from the Center for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography at the Department of Art History attracted great interest. I am also very grateful to Dr. Nicole Krup, Katharina Haack, Dr. Patrizia Munforte and, last but not least, the Department of Art History’s librarian Dr. Susanna Blaser-Meier for their support of this presentation and promotion of current research and up-and-coming talent in book form. I would also like to thank ETH Zurich, the sister institution of the University of Zurich, which set up the celebratory conclusion of the event and a delicious as well as abundant dinner—interrupted by some memorable speeches—in the beautifully decorated Dozentenfoyer. The occasion for the conference was to honor Dr. h. c. Kaspar M. Fleischmann in the year in which he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Zurich. The “American” accent made sense for the conference in its homage since Mr. Fleisch­ mann discovered photography for himself in the United States of America and, from that point forward, placed a clear emphasis as a collector on “straight photography.” In Switzerland, he tried to establish photography as an object for collection in private and public collections from the end of the 1970s, which initially prompted criticism and a lack of understanding. His passion for photography as a gallerist and collector, particularly traditional American photography as exemplified by Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams but also the photography of the nineteenth century and contemporary color photography, made him a privileged player in the era of institutional, i.e., museum-based anchoring of photography in Switzerland. He has continued to actively support and promote this process to this day, for instance at Kunsthaus Zürich, the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Musée de l‘Elysée in Lausanne. However, a change of direction came after he ended his activities as the owner of the legendary gallery “Zur Stockeregg”: he now committed himself to promoting teaching and research in the field of the theory and history of photography at the University of Zurich. The fact that this program of study along with its many guest lecturers and its research projects pursued over the past years (for instance the project to digitize and research the significant photo and art magazine Camera Work), were and are located at the Department of Art History—and not for example in the disciplines of literature or history, which would certainly have been justified in a historiographical sense—was due to a conviction that is manifested but also massively expanded upon and differentiated in this book: photography is art. But photography is, above all: image. And as image, photography to date still hasn’t been sufficiently researched, which in turn

Thanks

brings to the fore the expertise of art history as a historical, methodological and theoretically oriented “image science.” My heartfelt thanks go to the University of Zurich for its financial support of this event. The conference’s supporting program should also be mentioned and those involved in it properly thanked: I would like to thank Stefanie Little of the Edwynn Houk Galerie, Zurich, who made possible an exclusive visit to the Ilse Bing exhibit and provided a guided tour of the show. I would also like to thank the staff of Palmarium, particularly art historian Jonathan Levy, who showed conference attendees the Paul Strand photographs from the Kaspar M. Fleischmann collection that were kept in their rooms at the time. Furthermore, the international guests were so kind as to share their expertise on the research project into Camera Work as the idea was being formed during the run-up to the conference. A meeting took place in SIK-ISEA, Zurich to exchange ideas about the project and discuss it in detail; I would very much like to thank PD Dr. Roger Fayet, the director of SIK-ISEA, and its staff for their hospitality. Last but not least, I would like to thank the graphic designers of “büro 146” in Zurich for their designs for the flyers and poster, which fulfilled our vision for the use of haptic and visually impressive colors rich in association. My thanks also to Wolfens­ berger, a company with a storied history, especially to Thomi Wolfensberger, for the fantastic implementation of the design. This book wouldn’t have been possible without the editorial and imaginative collaboration of Stella Jungmann, M. A., and Nadine Jirka, M. A. I thank them very much for their untiring research into image rights, for clarifying detailed questions with the authors and not least for the discussions about the contributions. I heartily thank the authors for their essays and their great patience. At De Gruyter Publishing, I’d like to thank Dr. Katja Richter, Dr. Anna Louisa Schmidt and Arielle Thürmel for their considerate and expeditious support of the book project, Petra Florath for the excellent layout and graphic design. At this point, I have to give Petra Florath an extra “Thank You,” because this book was at times a real patch work. I also thank Penelope Krumm and Anthony  B. Heric very much for their excellent editing and translation work. During the last phase of making the book, Michael Thomas Taylor, Ph. D., came on board as an extra­ordinary translator and co-editor. My heartfelt thanks to Ryan Eyers, M. A., and Joel Scott, Ph. D., of Gegensatz Translation Collective, Berlin, who translated the introduction and my essay for this volume. Bettina Gockel    Zurich, October 2020

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