The First Color Photograph: Maxwell and Sutton's 1861 Achievement

Once the daguerreotype process reached the public, a new race began, in which the pioneers of photography poured all their effort and knowledge into improving image quality and reducing cost. Yet a greater goal loomed on the horizon: the permanent reproduction of color. That historic achievement belongs to James Clerk Maxwell, far better known for his work in electromagnetism. His interest in optics and color perception reached its peak during a lecture in 1861, when he carried out an unprecedented demonstration…

A Mind Beyond Electromagnetism

If your studies force you through the field of electromagnetism, you will inevitably cross swords with James Clerk Maxwell. In relaxed terms (and probably unfair to his importance), Maxwell established that light, electricity, and magnetism are different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Richard Feynman himself went so far as to say that Maxwell's discoveries were "the most significant event of the 19th century" in physics, and as expected, the world recognized him in many ways, from a mountain on Venus to the division of Saturn's rings (he was the one who determined they were made of smaller 'particles'), as well as a telescope in Hawaii, and the "maxwell" that measures magnetic flux.

The Science of Color Perception

But Maxwell also showed great interest in psychology and color perception, especially human perception. Between 1855 and 1872, the physicist published a series of investigations related to perception, color blindness, and color theory. Isaac Newton had already shown that with the help of prisms and lenses, white light could be 'split' into monochromatic components and then reconstructed. To that was added an apparent paradox: a yellow source and a red one produced orange light. Today we know this paradox as metamerism (two colors that appear identical but have different physical characteristics), and it was scientist Thomas Young who proposed a solution: color was perceived through a limited number of 'channels' in the human eye. Three, to be precise.

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Maxwell applied linear algebra to test Young's theory and concluded that if the sum of three colors could reproduce any perceivable color, then a color image could be built with a group of three filters of different colors. By extension, if three black-and-white photographs were taken with red, green, and blue filters, and their translucent prints were projected (using similar filters) and superimposed, the result for the human eye would be the total reproduction of the colors in the scene.

The Historic Demonstration of 1861

Thus we arrive at his historic 1861 lecture at the Royal Institution, where he demonstrated his color photograph with the help of Thomas Sutton, the inventor of the reflex camera. The object to photograph was a tartan ribbon (Scottish cloth). Sutton made three shots with red, green, and blue filters, although there was a fourth shot with a yellow filter that was not used. The final image had a strong blue tendency due to technical limitations: Sutton's plates barely had sensitivity to green and none to red.

Beyond the limited success, Maxwell and Sutton are remembered as the creators of the first permanent color photograph. It is important to highlight the word 'permanent' here, because there were several previous attempts with a much more chemistry-oriented profile, but none survived exposure to light. Forty years later, with the advance of panchromatic technology, color photography exploded and never left us again.