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The Melbourne Camera Club (formerly the Old Freemasons' Hall), 1998.
Alan Elliott ARPS
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The Melbourne Camera Club (formerly the Old Freemasons' Hall), 1998.
Daguerreotype process, 9 by 12 cm., gold toned. Exposure, 10 minutes @
f 8. Linhof Technika, 150 mm Symmar. Surprisingly, on scanning the
plate, the image on the monitor appeared in colour. By co-incidence
the colours although false, are appropriate. Alan Elliott ARPS.
[This daguerreotype was purchased from Alan by the State Library of
Victoria at an exhibition at the Gold Street Studio, Collingwood,
August 2002].
A Daguerreotype in the Colours of Nature?
Well, not exactly - but read on! Something quite amazing
happened recently. Ellie Young wished to include a daguerreotype I made a
few years ago in an exhibition she is planning of modern work done by old
processes. Further to that she wanted to use the image in the invitation
leaflet and asked me to scan it and send it by email.
However, as my scanner is not working I went to visit Ellie at her
studio. The scan initially was very dark and the image almost
indiscernible but by reducing the density and tweaking up the contrast
the picture on the monitor became really good. But the amazing thing was
that the image was in colour! Not only that but the colours although not
exact, were reasonably appropriate - pale blue sky and the Old
Freemason's Hall building grey brown. The bitumen road, however, instead
of dark grey was a dark golden brown. We were amazed. I have not seen any
reference to this phenomenon. Had we not seen it with our own eyes we
would not have believed it possible.
The capturing of colours was a prime aim right from the beginning of
photography. Critics of Daguerre's process when introduced in 1839 were
quick to point out its shortcomings. The image was laterally reversed, it
was hard to view, but most importantly the colours were missing. The
obvious solution was hand tinting but the daguerreotype surface was too
delicate to accept the colours until Hippolyte Fizeau in August 1840
introduced his gold toning process which strengthened the image and
hardened the surface. The Swiss worker Johann Baptist Isenring announced
the first practical tinting process in 1841 using a mixture of gum arabic
and pigments. Richard Beard who had purchased the British rights
wrote of this in 1843:
It was colour that was wanting to crown all the other
improvements and give perfection to the whole. This was, indeed,
holding the mirror up to Nature; and the result was that the
spectator, whose image had been momentarily reflected in the glass,
became the very transcript of his living self.
Hand tinting was a skilled craft which added to the cost, and
furthermore the applied colours depended more on the taste of the
colourist than truth to the original subject. Yet, many of the
products of the established studios are exquisite, rivalling the
beauty of the miniature paintings they sought to emulate. But
the ultimate aim was truth to nature and much effort was expended in
trying to find a way of recording the colours as well as the tones in
the camera, all in vain.
Electrolytic colouring methods were
proposed, for example in 1842 Daniel Davis Jr patented a procedure in
which colours were applied by placing the plate in a bath containing
salts of various metals and applying an electric current. It is far
from clear however how the process could produce different colours on
the one plate. In an extension of his method a year later Warren
Thompson claimed to have overcome this limitation by applying a resist
consisting of gum tragacanth to those areas which it was desired to
protect from the particular colour to be deposited. Between one bath
and the next he removed the gum resist with hot water and applied it
to the areas already coloured.
Then in 1850, Levi L. Hill (1816-1865), an obscure
daguerreian photographer in a remote part of New York State published
a booklet in which he claimed that:
Several years of experiments have led us to the
discovery of some remarkable facts, in reference to the process of
daguerreotyping in the colours of nature. For instance, we can produce
blue, red, violet and orange on one plate and at one and the same
time. We can, also, produce a landscape with these colours beautifully
developed - and this we can do in only one third more time than is
required for a daguerreotype. The great problem is fairly
solved.
This announcement caused a sensation. The sales of conventional
daguerreotypes, whether plain or hand coloured, slumped. Hill
was reluctant to publish the full details of his process until he was
satisfied that it was perfect. He received enthusiastic support from
no less a scientist than Samuel Morse who had seen some of Hill's work
in his laboratory. Hill eventually published his procedure in 1856 but
by then he had become the subject of much criticism and many had come
to the conclusion that his claims were fraudulent and his results
faked. When his process A Treatise on Heliography;
or the Production of Pictures, by Means of Light, in Natural
Colours became available it was found to be complex and was
criticised unfairly for being vague and obscure. The eleven steps are
explained fairly clearly but the logic behind each one is left to the
imagination. His process involved dangerous, poisonous and even
explosive chemicals. After an accidental explosion of silver fulminate
he remarked that 'I was as deaf as an adder for a week'. At one stage
in the process it was even necessary to make a supply of hydrofluoric
acid - a hazardous liquid which etches glass. A glance at his
procedure was enough to deter all but the most determined
experimenters. Then, as the publication coincided with the decline of
the daguerreotype process, it is not surprising that heliography was
soon forgotten. Surviving examples of his plates show several
muted colours on the one plate but it is by no means certain that the
colours are true to nature. Clearly, whatever its merits, Hill's
heliography was never likely to displace hand colouring even if it had
been available in the hey-day of the daguerrian era.
A modern researcher, Professor Joseph Boudreau claims to have
replicated the long and costly process but noted that 'precisely how
the colour is formed on the plates remains problematical'. Furthermore
it is difficult to imagine how each of the applied colouring
substances could find its way to the appropriate area of the
plate. After all, the daguerreotype plate, even when sensitised with
chlorine as in Hill's process, would be insensitive to green, yellow,
orange and red and thus these colours would be represented only by the
amount of reflected blue and UV, and thus bear no direct relationship
to the original colour.
Now let us return to the plate which is the subject of this
note. Looking carefully at the daguerreotype in diffused daylight at a
critical angle, faint colours are in fact discernable and these are
the similar to those found in the scan.. Presumably the observed
colours have been accentuated by the scanning process but I must
emphasise that no colours were introduced by software. But why were
colours there in the first place? My first thought was that they are
interference colours. We know that the colour produced by interference
(eg soap bubbles, or a film of oil on water) depends on the thickness
of the film. Perhaps the thickness of the surface layer of the
daguerreotype depends upon the intensity and the wavelength of
the actinic rays at each point and that this governs the thickness of
the film and thus the interference colour. However I could find
nothing in the literature to support this hypothesis.
Now, when Max Melvin scanned the Old Freemasons' Hall image he
found colours similar to those found by Ellie, whereas an 'authentic'
daguerreotype portrait of 1861 yielded only a rich brown
tone. Presumably the brown tone, not visible when viewed in the hand,
arose from the sensitivity of the scanner to the gold deposited in the
gilding step.
Further research has shown that in some circumstances overexposed
highlights can show as a bluish colouration on a daguerreotype
plate. As an exposure which is correct for the building would
certainly overexpose the UV-rich sky, this could well be the reason
why a faint blue tinge appeared in parts of the sky area. Secondly,
the gold toning process seems to deposit gold mainly in the mid-tones
and shadows, thus there would be gold in the image of the building and
the roadway but not in the sky. It seems likely that the scanning
process is more sensitive to the faint colours than to the grey tones
of the image. Seemingly, it was only by coincidence that the colours
happened to be very close to those of the original.
From this admittedly small sample we may draw the tentative
conclusions that the colours were not artifacts introduced by a
particular scanner but were dependent upon some peculiarity of the
image - in particular the blue of the overexposed sky and the gold
toning which were both accentuated by the scanning process. It
would be interesting to scan an 'authentic' daguerreotype
landscape but I do not have an example to test.
I would like to thank Ellie and Max for their contributions to this
note.
Alan Elliott ARPS
Sources: M. Foresta and J. Wood, Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art
of the American Daguerreotypes 1995 . Michael Jacob, Colour and
the Daguerreotype, The Daguerreian Annual, 1997. B. Lowry and
I. Lowry, The Silver Canvas, 1998. W.Becker, Patents for
colour/reply/Levi Hill, email, 29 July 2000.
[This note was first published in a Royal Photographic Society
newsletter]
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