It’s important to remember that the pre-photographers, those wild experimenters and mad scientists who embarked on the magical quest to invent the medium never intended to pioneer a monochromatic art. From the start, they sought to create color imagery. In 1850 the Reverend Levi Hill made the (somewhat unsubstantiated) claim that he had “perfected” a process for creating full color daguerreotypes, though the process was unreliable and complex. Even Sir John Herschel was exploring ways to introduce color into photography.
The exciting possibilities of color photography (finally) emerged in 1907. The Lumière brothers introduced the Autochrome, a color transparency coated with layers of potato starch dyed in red, blue and green supported by a glass plate. Some autochromes survive today and they’re gorgeous. The book The Dawn of Color Photography illustrates a fantastic collection of images made in 1909 with this delicate and tedious process. When Kodak introduced color film in 1935 the autochrome was rapidly made obsolete.
Today with camera phones and digital and film cameras, (color) photography is at our fingertips. When combined with Photoshop (or one of the many hand- held photo manipulation apps) an infinite number of ways to alter saturation, shift color, adjust and tweak images is just a few keystrokes or swipes away. But, are these tools allowing one to reimagine and newly interpret an image? Or are they just offering predictable variation? Further, do the resulting prints offer a depth and physicality of experience to the viewer? Steichen’s gum-over-platinum prints have both depth and physicality.
Following his lead I was recently laboring to use gum bichromate to add color to a series of kallitypes, and failing. I was relaying my frustrations to a friend who mentioned that in the past he had used watercolor pigment as a way to apply a subtle wash of color over the entire area of a print. Since my gum trials were leading only to frustration I decided to give hand- coloring a chance. I was shocked at what I found.
This article discusses the necessary steps to create a kallitype or what is sometimes call the “poor man’s platinum” print and then offers a step-by-step look at hand-coloring with water colors.