Oldest Colored Landscape Photograph
While the fundamental theory of color photography may have been understood, a practical method of color photography had not been achieved. Some experimenters pursued the idea of a direct method of color reproduction which did not rely on mixing primary colors. In 1891 Gabriel Lippmann, a professor of physics at the Sorbonne, demonstrated a color process which was based on the phenomenon of light interference—the interaction of light waves that produces the brilliant colors seen in soap bubbles. This process won Lippmann a Nobel Prize in 1908 and was marketed commercially for a short time around the turn of the century.
In this photograph of the French countryside in 1877, we can see the more rudimentary methods of color photography used. Photographer, Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron, was a pioneer in color photography and was the mastermind behind the process that created this photo. After writing an unpublished paper setting forth his basic concepts in 1862, he worked on developing practical processes for color photography on the three-color principle, using both additive and subtractive methods In 1868 he patented his ideas (French Patent No. 83061) and in 1869 he published them in Les couleurs en photographie, solution du problème. The discovery of dye sensitization by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel in 1873 greatly facilitated the initial three-color analysis on which all of Ducos de Hauron’s methods depended.
