3. Wavelengths and Potato Starch

Considered sorely lacking when photography was invented, colour is one of the major advancements in the history of nineteenth-century photography. This paper focuses on the period between the invention of the interferential colour photography process by the French physicist Gabriel Lippmann in 1891 and the invention of the Autochrome technique by the French industrialists Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1907. It discusses the tension between immateriality and materiality in the history of the first colour photographs. While the colours in the interferential process have no materiality, the singularity of the Autochrome technique derives from its use of potato starch grains dyed with red, green and blue aniline dyes. While their ways of recording colour are completely different, however, these processes use a common means of visualization: projection, which produces an immaterial and temporalised image.