#heliograph

Spanish vintage postcard

1902

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932), Seenlandschaft [seascape], 1971. Heliograph in colours on light machine-made laid cardboard, Edition of 100.

Heliograph in colours on light laid cardboard.

While the 19th century would see a proliferation of new photographic technologies, the development of a reliable means of capturing stable colors would have to wait until the early 20th century, despite the best efforts of many. Until the introduction of the autochrome process, patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers in France, the vast majority of photographers that wanted to see color in their photographs had to add it themselves by hand. You can see a selection of images produced using the autochrome process in the Hagley Digital Archive by clicking here. While autochrome photography constituted a massive step forward in photographic history, its colors were not exact, and its limitations were often most apparent when photographing people. While new methods of reproducing color in photographs were introduced over the next few decades, this remained a persistent problem.The circa 1950s photograph shown here was taken at the DuPont's Photo Products laboratory in Parlin, New Jersey, where company scientists were working on experimental films that could more accurately capture skin tones. DuPont was not alone in this effort; it had many competitors, most notably the Kodak Company. Beginning in the 1950s, Kodak began issuing photographs of employee and studio model Shirley Page to photo labs processing Kodak film as a reference image for correctly developing skin tones on film. As the decades passed, the original Shirley retired, but the Shirley card, featuring new models, continued. One thing that did not change was the race of the model; as in the image above, Kodak’s Shirleys were all white women. By the 1970s, however, Kodak had begun to face criticism over the lack of racial diversity in its Shirley cards, which did result in poorer quality photographs of non-white subjects. In 1977, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously refused to use Kodak film stock while filming in Mozambique, declaring the product to be both inadequate for the job and a product of racism. By the 1980′s, Kodak and other photographic products manufacturers that had also adopted the Shirley card method had responded to pressure and were issuing cards showing multi-racial group photographs. This photograph is from the Hagley Library’s DuPont Company product information collection (Accession 1972.341). To view more digitized material from this collection, visit its page in our Digital Archive by clicking here.

https://www.alphabushcraft.com/collections/fire-making/products/solar-brother-adventure-kit

German signallers manning a heliograph in a trench, c1917.

Heliograph #26 (Atlantic Ocean/Mojave) by Chris McCaw, 2013