Photography Pioneers: James Clerk Maxwell
Maxwell was born on the 13th of June of 1831, in Edinburg, Scotland, and was a Scottish mathematician who did revolutionary work on many types of fields like electricity, magnetism, optics, theory of gases and, of course, photography.
James Clerk Maxwell started from a young age, writing paper and developing ideas. At the age of 14, he wrote a paper on ovals — On the description of oval curves, and those having a plurality of foci — those ideas were not completing new, since Descartes already had defined such curves, but this work was still remarkable for a 14-year-old.
But where does Photography fit in?
Well, he was particularly interested in the study of color vision, following the steps of Isaac Newton and Thomas Young. From 1855 to 1872, Maxwell release a few papers on perception of colour, colour-blindness and color-theory. He was even rewarded the Rumford Medal for his paper “On the Theory of Colour Vision”.
Maxwell wanted to prove his theory on colour perception, namely in colour photography, his idea was filters: “if a sum of any three lights could reproduce any perceivable color, then colour photography could be produced with a set of three coloured filters”.
“ In the course of his 1855 paper, Maxwell proposed that, if three black-and-white photographs of a scene were taken through red, green and blue filters and transparent prints of the images were projected onto a screen using three projectors equipped with similar filters, when superimposed on the screen the result would be perceived by the human eye as a complete reproduction of all the colours in the scene.”
From Wikipedia.
It was during an 1861 Royal Institution lecture on colour theory that Maxwell presented the world’s first demonstration of colour photography. Thomas Sutton (inventor of the single-lens reflex camera) took the photo. He photographed the same tartan ribbon three times with a red, green and blue filters. It was supposed to be four filters, including a yellow filter, but, according to Maxwell, it was not used in the demonstration, because of Sutton’s photographic plates weren’t very sensible to green and completely insensitive to red. The results of this experience were far from perfect, in the public account of the lecture is stated that:
“if the red and green images had been as fully photographed as the blue,” it “would have been a truly-colored image of the riband. By finding photographic materials more sensitive to the less refrangible rays, the representation of the colors of objects might be greatly improved.”
The first coloured photography isn’t perfect, nevertheless it’s the first time we saw color on a photography, and it’s impressive, especially because colour photography still took 40 years to become a thing.
Sometimes we take things for granted. Things that you never thought of losing or having. We have to look into the past to understand how we’re fortunate now, that’s why we have this column on our blog, named Photography Pioneers, where we honor people that made photography what it is today.
