KEY POINTS:
BOOK REVIEW
* A Century of Colour Photography, by Pamela Roberts
* Reed Publishing $79.99
* Reviewed by Greg Bowker
Capturing a moment has been what photographers through the ages have strived for. And a century ago this dream was made a lot easier as they were able to photograph in colour.
Pamela Roberts, a former curator at the Royal Photographic Society, delivers a detailed account of the various developments in the colour process in a well-documented account.
A selection of large, beautifully printed photographic art works walks the reader through the way the colour process has changed and been made more accessible for the commercial and domestic photographer.
Using more than 200 images, the book illustrates how photographers have used colour to relate to the current trends of digital photography and the methods the early masters used as they hand-coloured their work.
Although the book seems to omit some of the great photographers of our time, you soon forget and become lost in detailed descriptions of the old colour processes such as Bertha Jaques' cyanotypes and Edward Steicher's Gum Bichromate image of the Flatiron building in New York.
As you move through this remarkable history, you start to understand how photographers have pushed the process along. As soon as colour was available, they wanted it richer and more finely detailed. Black and white photography is solemnly mentioned through the book, as you could expect, though an interesting association is made with artists and photographers in the 1980s and how they saw colour as the new black and white. Some will always argue that the two types of photography are clearly different and should remain so. John Pfahl's images taken through the 1980s as part of his works Power Places and Smoke show how colour added emotion to his soft studies of the effects of industry on the landscape.
Roberts also talks about the transition that Joel Meyerowitz took, first as an art director and designer before becoming a photographer. Meyerowitz started shooting with 35mm colour slide film but struggled with the small format's quality. He moved to a large-format 10x8 camera that slowed down the process and gave him the quality he required.
An interesting comparison can be made between Meyerowitz' early and later works regarding how colour has changed even in the past 20 to 30 years. His picture of Cold Storage Beach (1976) is soft and pastel-like. Contrast this with his picture of the destruction site of the World Trade Centre, taken in 2001 as part of his work Images from Ground Zero, and you notice changes that can only have come from developments in film technology.
The history lesson throughout the book is made refreshing as Roberts' clear text, and the wealth of images, explain the technical and creative changes over the past century.
* Greg Bowker is a Herald photographer.
