Lippmann photography

Abstract

After the invention of black-and-white photography in the nineteenth century a lot of research was devoted to the possibility of recording natural colour images. Already, during the eighteenth cenrury it was known that moist silver chloride could record colours when exposed to strong light, such as a solar spectrum. Johann Thomas Seebeck (1770–1831) was able to record such images; this was mentioned in Zur Farbenlehre by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The philosophical explanation of this was: ‘light chose to impress itself on material objects in its own colours’.1 Thus, it makes sense to describe such a process a natural colour-recording technique. In the recording material used for Lippmann colour photographs, the colours of the object are acrually recorded according to the Goethe-Seebeck description. However, the recordings by Seebeck were not permanent; they disappeared quickly when exposed to light. Later, Sir John Herschel made a systematic investigation of solar spectra recorded in silver-chloride impregnated paper.2 Although Herschel could record colour, he could not find a method to fix the images. This type of photographic recording technique is often referred to as heliochromy (sun-colouring) and the images as heliochromes.