A beautiful blue sky: the emergence of color photography

Since the news of the invention of photography in 1839, the challenge was laid down to reproduce natural colors. The daguerreotype, the fruit of Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) and Louis Daguerre’s (1787-1851) joint efforts, made it possible to produce a single, instant photograph without color.

Edmond Becquerel (1820-1891) made several successful attempts at photographing the solar spectrum in 1848. These images, which he could not fix, were particularly fragile and disappeared when exposed to light.

From then on, in Europe and the United States, many scholars and photographers set out to solve the question of color, such as Charles Cros (1842-1888), Gabriel Lippmann (1845-1921), ME Walker, Abel Niépce de Saint Victor (1805-1870), Alphonse Poitevin (1819-1882), and Blanquart-Evrard (1802-1872), etc.

Three questions arose: how to be faithful to natural colors, how to fix the images, and how to duplicate the photos taken, like with negatives which let you produce as many prints as you like.

Educated by tutors, passionate about optics and the study of colors, Louis Ducos du Hauron (1837-1920) took a very early interest in photography.

In 1862, Ducos du Hauron made his first attempts at color photography and published his results.
In order to do it, he worked from the theories of Maxwell who set out the trichromatic principle for the reproduction of color.

Ducos du Hauron went on to test different mediums and colored pigments to try to obtain stable and color photographs in colors as close as possible to natural colors.

His archives contain hand-drawn 'topographic' surveys indicating the 'real' colors he had to reproduce for each area of photographic subjects.

Still lifes and dioramas were his favorite subjects.

On May 7, 1869, Ducos du Hauron submitted to the French Society of Photography a paper on heliochromy, the indirect method of color photography that he had created and perfected over the past ten years.

Ducos du Hauron's method consisted in taking three successive shots of the same subject through three different colored filters (orange, violet, and green), in order to ‘select’ the three primary colors successively.

Each photo was then printed on a transparent medium on which the corresponding filter was fixed and then the three positives were superimposed one over the other. He called the resulting photograph a positive heliochromy in color.

To make taking the shot easier, the other major contribution Ducos du Hauron invented was a device dedicated to trichromy: the melanochromoscope.

Ducos du Hauron wanted to reduce the number of steps for the operator. From 1885, he filed for several patents bearing witness to his efforts. Finally, he filed for a patent for the melanochromoscope on May 16, 1899.

The device was equipped with three colored filters. Through an ingenious system of mirrors, the operator produced in a single use the three negatives necessary to produce a color photograph, without having to change the filter between the shots.

In the end, the work of Ducos du Hauron was more or less forgotten for several decades, but photographers made use of his results to develop their own methods. The famous autochrome method commercialized by the Lumiere brothers in 1907 was inspired by Ducos du Hauron’s theories.

In the 1930s, Marcel Arthaud worked from the melanochromoscope patent to invent his OV2, a trichromatic camera, in which the colored filters had to be changed between each shot.

Using his technique, he produced the color brochure given to first-class passengers on the SS Normandie ocean liner as well as a number of publicity photos.