blog.macalicious:Ramblings:History

A (Not So) Black & White World

31 Mar, 2006
Posted at 23.38 PST

It’s not something most people pay any attention to, but color photography is a lot older than you’d think.  Various techniques for achieving colorphotographs date back to at least the turn of the 20th century.  For most of us though, color photography dates to maybe the 1950s, for that was when it really began gaining in popularity.

History is a subject in which I’ve always had a great deal of interest, especially that of Europe and North America during the 19th and 20th centuries.  Along with Cultural Anthropology, it’s what I studied most in college.  There are a bewildering array of forces at work in the today’s world, and it is flat-out impossible to gain anything even approaching a gestalt of the world around us without an understanding of the origin and reasons for those forces. 

Until very, very recently in historical terms, human civilization didn’t change all that much from its beginnings, be it ancient Iraq in the West, or China in the East.  And when it did, it did so slowly, often over generations.  This is something difficult for the modern mind to grasp, being immersed from birth in constant change.  The daily life of the average person in 1750 was not all that different from the life of someone living during the height of
the Roman Empire. But then in the late 18th century all hell broke loose, so to speak.  For a variety of reasons cultural, historical, economic, and others both known and unknown, the Industrial Revolution began gathering steam—forgive the pun—in Great Britain.  Its impact was so profound that the life of virtually every human being on the planet has been utterly transformed in an unprecedented short amount of time.

Popular history dates the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution to James Watts’ steam engine.  While its roots go much deeper to forces set in motion sometimes centuries earlier (no invention springs forth from its creator like Athena from Zeus’ forehead), the steam engine does provide a convenient place to consider as a starting point.  Out of that steam engine—and the transformations wrought in the English society and economy  by it—comes nearly every object in daily life, including the computer being used to display this.

And the computer, by way of the inventions that lead to it, brings us neatly back to the subject at hand:  color photography.  Computers would be useless to people without displays, whether CRT or LCD, and display technology has its roots in the effort to create a static snapshot of what the eye sees—in other words, photography.

Photography, like the steam engine, was one of those transformative technologies of the Industrial Revolution.  We take photographs for granted today, but the ability to capture a moment in time and transfer it to a piece of paper is one of the more astounding feats we as human beings have pulled off.  Think about it a moment.  You grab your camera, digital or conventional, press the button, and what have you done?  You have in essence frozen in time a piece of reality.  No wonder we like them so much, they address a deep-seated desire in humans to remember events clearly, and enhance one of the fundamental differences between us and all other animals on the planet, namely an ability to transcend the eternal now.  Language, the defining difference between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom, is what provides the framework for our minds to structure time and memories.  Without it, we too would be stuck in the eternal now, unable to form the long-term memories upon which our personalities rest.  (Yes, I know, there are exceptions.   But the general truth of the statement is valid).  And photographs provide a means of leveraging our talent for language into the realm of the visual, which is fortunate as we are at heart visual creatures.

One of the most intriguing elements of photography, is that it captures reality very much in the same manner we see it.  Our memory doesn’t work like a video camera.  Instead most memories exist more like snapshots, brief moments that for whatever reason have stuck with us over time.  Photography dovetails nicely with the way our minds work.  What is interesting though, is how photographs give us a sort of pseudo-memory of events that we have never seen.  Their power is evident in how we perceive historical time periods and events.  When you see the phrase ‘World War II,’ or ‘1938,’ the images that pop into your head are usually black and white.  Interesting, no?  But when Rome, or the Middle Ages are brought up, the images that come to mind are generally color in nature.  It seems an odd trick at first, but makes sense when thought about.  Our mind’s eye images of periods long ago are generally influenced, or even defined by, old paintings of historical scenes.  But then came photography, which singlehandedly replaced the painting as a means of recording moments in time.  So all our pseudo-memories of historical events and daily life suddenly go black and white around 1850, and stay that way for the next hundred years.

In 1929, those forces set in motion by the Industrial Revolution spiraled out of control.  It wasn’t the first time it had happened, but its severity is hard to imagine today.  The Great Depression dragged along for ten dreary years.  In the United States, one of the results of our desperate efforts to get a handle on what was happening was the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.  The effectiveness of the many programs put in place in the struggle to end the Depression may be open to debate, among them the WPA and other make-work programs, but while their effectiveness may be argued, the results of many of them are still with us.  One of the many programs instituted in the late 1930s was a government effort to capture a visual record of American life and also document the mobilization effort as we prepared for war.  Its practical value may have been low, but it did provide a means of support for many photographers that otherwise would have not had work.

Kodak introduced color photography as we know it in 1936.  It was rarely used however, as the the film was expensive.  Prices remained high enough until the 1950s that most photographers avoided it.  Most, however, doesn’t equal all.  Color photographs of the period may be rare, and their quantity overwhelmed by the sheer amount of black and white pictures taken during that time, but some effort has been made to bring them together into their own collection.  And when you see them together, it is hard to overstate how they change your perception of the time period.  It’s one thing to know the world did not exist in black and white back then, but it is another thing entirely to actually see it in color.  If, like me, you value history, they are well worth viewing.  Thanks to the Library of Congress, it is now possible to do so, and they even provide free for the taking 100+ MB scans of most of them.  They aren’t color corrected, and due to their age often have dirt, scratches, and other imperfections on them, but they will nonetheless utterly change how you envision the time period.  I’ve found them so intriguing I’ve lost several hours to simply wandering through the collection, and have been taking the most arresting of them and cleaning them up.  I’ll begin posting them to the Graphics Factory over the course of the next week or so.  The link is below.  I hope this little tangent gives a bit of…framing…to the photos.

American Memory

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