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Topic: Early colour photographs
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 11-12-2004 06:01 PM
I'm sure that there were photographers in the US, and in many other places, doing the same thing; I've certainly seen other colour photographs from this period, but they weren't of this quality.
I don't know if the photographer ever printed any of these images in colour, the only prints I could see on either of the web sites were in black and white. Projecton of three plates with a tri-unial lantern is not ideal, you can never get perfect registration of the images. I did try doing this myself when I was at college, in the '70s. I also tried making prints from separation negatives on chromogenic colour paper, Ektacolour 37 RC I seem to remember. I got some results that weren't bad, but it took a lot of fiddling around with colour correction masks. It's a lot easier to do it now by just tweaking the curves in Photoshop. I never tried dye-transfer printing. There are a few people still doing this today. Just this morning I received an e-mail newsletter from Ctein. He has a web site here As well as making dye-transfer prints, he is also involved in digital techniques.
There has been renewed interest in the so-called 'alternative processes' in recent years. There are several shops in London which sell materials for these; something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. There are probably more photographic techniques being used today than ever before.
There are even people making Lippmann photographs, which has got to be just about the rarest, and most unlikely sounding, colour processes ever iinvented. There's a description of it here and, amasingly, it really did work. I'd love to see a good example of it, the only one I've ever seen was a small piece of a broken plate, and that was badly water damaged.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 11-13-2004 03:21 AM
Well, it's thirty years since I was there, but at that time Leningrad and Moscow were both pretty modern cities, though there were plenty of older, tradtional buildings. If you went a fairly short distance outside, maybe 50km, little seemed to have changed from the time of the photographs. In Moscow there was a fair amount of development going on, some of it rather dull blocks of flats, not that different from what was being built in London in the '60s, but there were also new 'public' buildings, theatres, libraries etc, whiich seemed to be of better quality. Transport, at least within the cities was well developed, the airports that we used were similar to those in England at the time, buses and trams were frequent and reliable, but not as comfortable as the routemaster buses that we had in London at the time. The RMs were between six and twenty years old at the time, and a few of them are still in service today. The Metro was better than the London Underground, cheaper, certainly much cleaner, though a much smaller system.
Russian technology was certainly advanced in some areas; I think the difference in a Communist system is that the prioritiies are different. Defence was seen as important, as was anything that would bring prestege to the state in the eyes of the World, e.g. getting the first man into space.
The indivdual seemed to have what they *needed* in order to play their part in the state, healthcare was good, I had a minor accident while I was there, and needed the serviices of a Doctor. People may not have had what they *wanted* however. There was plenty of food in the shops, people were not going to go hungry, but the choice was limited, one day there might be plenty of fruit, but no cheese, the next there might be cheese, but no tea.
If a Russian woman needed a new dress she would be able to find one that would fit her, it would be cheap, it would be of reasonable quality, but it would probably be the same as the one that her mother had bought in the '50s, and probably the same as the one that her grandmother had bought in the '30s. It's a dress, it's about the right size, it will do the job. It doesn't matter what colour it is, it certainly doesn't need to be the latest fashion, those things were not important to the State. I don't really think there was a sense of fashion, except maybe in the teenagers, I don't think wearing clothes that hadn't changed in style in decades would be seen as a problem by most people.
There was a lot of queueing; in most shops you had to queqe three times. You would queue to ask for what you wanted, and get a bill for it, then you would go to the cashier, and queue to pay for it and get a receipt, then you would go back to the counter and queue to collect it. I really hated this; there were very few shops iin London where you still had to do this at that time, and the queues were much shorter here. I remember goiing into a bookshop to buy a map. It was a large, modern shop, well stocked, they had just the map I needed, the staff were helpful, but it took over an hour of queueing to get it. The Russian people didn't seem to mind this, or to fnd it odd; I suppose it's a question of what you're used to.
I love the photo of the old fellow, a ferryman I think, at the bottom of the LOC page. Isn't he great? And the strange colours on the water, coused by movement between the three exposures. He must have be born in about 1830.
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