Week 21 - 2020
Heinrich Kühn, Flower in vase, 1907. Belongs to the Preus Museum Collection
Colourful danger
One takes what one has, and sometimes that’s potato starch.
The brothers Lumière were, as their name suggests, quite bright. At first, they were pioneers in developing living images. Afterwards they invented a method which finally brought colours into photography. Up until then all photographs had been colourless (albeit full of contrasts), and in order to develop these colours they did in fact use potato starch.
They covered the glass-plate with a thin layer of incredibly small starchseeds, pre-coloured in reddish orange, violet and green. Afterwards they covered the “starch-layer” with a light sensitive material. The plates were then placed inside the camera for exposure. The starch-particles acted as tiny filters. When you looked at the final picture in daylight (light was essential in order to view the image), it flickered like a colourful jewel.
Since 1907 this process was marketed under the name “autochrome”. But, in addition to being beautiful it was a slow, difficult and expensive process. Nevertheless, it gained a large crowd of supporters, especially among artists like Heinrick Kühn. The autochromes made photographers think in colour, which is very different to photographing in black and white. Kühn expressed a concern that images could be “dangerously colourful”; that the colours could easily consume the whole motif. This is not the case in Kühns somber portrayal of the spring flowers in this photo.