Photography (3)

The credits for this book cover include a picture library and then someone else for ‘photo colorizing’.

Here’s a colourised postcard I bought (50p) in a market last week:



Just as the range of colour in painting was for centuries limited to the particular pigments available to artists, so also colour in photography and film was determined by the available technologies. The birth of photography is generally dated to 1839, when the daguerreotype process was introduced; colour photography wasn’t commercially introduced until 1907 (the Autochrome process, developed by the Lumière brothers); Photochrom, a printing process developed by a Swiss inventor in the 1880s and then commercially licensed, allowed the mass-production of many millions of colourised postcards in the early 1900s; but colour wasn’t generally available to amateur photographers until the mid-20th century. Colour was largely ignored by fine-art photographers (but not commercial ones: fashion, advertising) until the 1970s; it took until William Eggleston and Saul Leiter (both of whose photos are now often used on book covers) and certain others arrived.

The charm of early colour photographs and colourised postcards has to do with the lack of glare and oppressive shadows and the softness of the colours. Ian Jeffrey (in Photography: A Concise History; 1981, but still a lovely book) notes that the Autochrome process allowed Lartigue ‘to make photographs of great serenity. This seems to have been the strength of colour and also its flaw. Polychrome worlds are both radiant and genial. They easily imply atmosphere and suggest ready access to the place and its weather.’ Feeding on this – life used to be more simple, surely – are nostalgia and its seductions, which include the temptation to believe that the ways in which a past era represented itself to itself, ways determined by the available technology, actually showed how it was.

The past is a different country, but chiefly in its mindsets; its sunlight was no less bright, its skies no less blue and its fire engines and blood no less red than they are now. To reproduce the look of early colour photography – a look achieved by technology now redundant, a look that sways into fashion – involves effortful reconstruction (and in film the use of filters, I guess, after watching a 2008 film last night that is set in the 1920s and had its colour tones very managed), but is frequently used as a form of shorthand – because of its seductions, and because of claims to something that gets called authenticity. A colourised photograph on a book cover indicates that the book is set in the early 20th century. A book about the First World War will have a black-and-white or a colourised photograph, as above (unless there has been a recent film of the book, in which case there may be a still from the film, itself colour-manipulated). (Sepia and similar – those effects you can get at a click on the cheapest photo-editing programs – are used for the same purpose; the cover of a 2007 Penguin edition of Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party has a sepia photograph and a brownish-yellow sticker: ‘The book that inspired Downton Abbey’.) In fact, the subject matter of colourised photographs is shown not as the people of the time saw it but more as the cats, dogs and rabbits saw it (the picture below is from a website explaining colour to children). Our visual understanding of the past is cat-eyed.