Maxwell, Sutton, and the Birth of Color Photography

A Binocular Study

J. Cat

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137338310
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire des sciences

This focused and incisive study reassesses the historic collaboration between James Clerk Maxwell and Thomas Sutton. It reveals that Maxwell and Sutton were closer to true partners than has commonly been assumed, and shows how their experiments illuminate the role of technology, representation, and participation in Maxwell's natural philosophy.

1

Introduction: Shared Media, Differing Projects and Projections

Abstract: This chapter introduces a new account of the interest in photography from the physicist James Clerk Maxwell and the photographer Thomas Sutton and of their alleged contribution to the birth of color photography. Color photography was a tool to explore and explain different properties and uses of color light. The collaboration between Maxwell and Sutton was an episode of two projects. The book offers a critical account, social, intellectual and material, of an episode in a tangle of several histories: of the identity of photographic practice and its outcomes, representation, experimentation, fixity, objectivity, collaboration, and the art/science and natural/artificial dichotomies. The argument emphasizes the role of criteria for colored and photographic images, Victorian technological cultures of visual representation, Maxwell’s and Sutton’s researches and resouces, and the relation between photographers, artists and scientists.

Cat, Jordi. Maxwell, Sutton and the Birth of Color Photography: A Binocular Study. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137338310.

When and how was color photography achieved? What did Maxwell do? What did Sutton do? Why? How? The birth of color photography was protracted and experimental, animated by artistic and natural standards of representation and of human perception, chemical experimentation and optical technology. A typical account goes like this: In a defining episode, the renowned Victorian physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), with the assistance of the little-known photographer Thomas Sutton (1819–1875), sought to support Thomas Young’s theory of color vision and produced the first color photograph.¹ More extreme versions omit even the reference to Young’s theory.

I do not mean to point to the extreme formulation as a target; but I believe doing so can provide a helpful reference frame and a narrative ground zero for locating my alternative account of the episode and its circumstances. This episode, I suggest here, sits uneasily with most histories of photography, especially as part of color photography. Standard accounts of the significance of Maxwell’s and Sutton’s photographic interests can be perplexing or frustratingly thin: Where they fit, and how, and what they explain, and how. The episode calls for a broader and more detailed understanding: of Maxwell’s engagement with photography and its value; Sutton’s interest in science; the media that facilitated their interaction; their collaboration, its purposes and consequences; and so on. Within this configuration my account will enrich, revisit and revise the standard story, especially with regards to social dynamics (sociology), aims and methods (methodology) and the outcome, with its identity (ontology) and significance (theory). The episode appears more interesting when relocated to a space with additional dimensions of discussion: in the histories of the identity of photographic practice and its outcome, understanding, objectivity, experimentation, collaboration and the relation between the natural and the artificial.

More thoroughly contextualized, the episode appears clearly related to its rich Victorian milieu and to Maxwell’s life and natural philosophy. The episode is emblematic of Victorian technology and its role in representational activities, commercial, artistic and scientific. It is emblematic of Maxwell’s own approach to natural philosophy (both symbolic and figural, abstract and concrete). It is emblematic also, at least within the Victorian British context, of multiple and shifting roles of photography, the ambiguously so-called science-art. As I explain below, it evolved from predominantly amateur craft and fine art to profession, from habits and standards of amateur experimentation and skill, with aesthetic standards and uses, to professional ones, with a self-understanding and application that became, instrumental, mechanical, standardized, controllable, operated and systematic, focused on commercial value, e.g., to detailed and accurate representation and reproduction, in science and the study of color.

Not coincidentally, these interests and values were relevant to the mid-Victorian scientific interest in objective mathematical representation and exact measurement. The same interests found technological and commercial application, and support, in an industrialized economy that involved precise accounting and mechanized mass production of predictable, identical goods. Just in case, I must caution that mine is not a reductive perspective; rather, I believe intellectual and other symbolic factors did play a separate role alongside material and social ones, while each type may be related to the others, even replaced by them, even if specific instances cannot.

In general, a critical approach to photography and science focuses on their history, as the evolving context of relevant choices and changes and the conditions of their possibility. The early and Victorian nineteenth century valued realism over expressionism and utopia. In simple terms, this conception, as drawn by Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Mann and set in contrast with the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, fails to acknowledge that the Victorians did not reject faith, improvement and voluntarism. Rather, theirs was a time and culture of powers: of matter, will and cognition; of representation, regulation and reform.² There were sustained and pervasive attempts to comprehend and inhabit the natural through the artificial, something attested to by different kinds of engineering projects of construction and convention—from the technological to the political, the intellectual and linguistic.

Functional construction would replace creativity and individuality. The artificial, constructive factor would constitute the heart—or should we say the steam engine?—of mid-Victorian projects of doing and knowing, of imaging of the world and self. Of course, this cultural movement preceded the Victorians, and it had been much stimulated in the late eighteenth century by the ameliorist attitude towards technology and the visible conditions set off by the Industrial Revolution.³

In keeping with these trends, mechanical and optical devices were introduced as artificial models of natural systems and phenomena. This role was bolstered by their engineering, industrial and entertainment value. Last but not least, they embodied a theological warrant, as both freemasonic doctrines and natural theology proclaimed that natural systems too were the measured products of design—divine design. Thus we find Maxwell conclude in social–theological terms his discussion of the nature of molecules considering the appropriateness of the methods and representations of social statistics:

Each molecule, therefore, throughout the universe, bears impressed on it the stamp of a metric system as distinctly as does the metre of the Archives at Paris, or the double royal cubit of the Temple of Karnac.

(. . .) the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent.

(. . .) They continue to this day as they were created—perfect in number and measure and weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth in statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are essential constituents of the image of Him who in the beginning created, not only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist.⁴

Maxwell distinguished between the “development of natural truth” and the “envelopment of artificial craft”. The latter is the world of design and imagery, in which models and diagrams are constructions and forms of clothing. His hope was that they would open a path to the natural truth.

Sensitive to art and science, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert shared an interest in and talent for drawing, painting and photography. Beyond their personal appreciation of the political value of portraiture and their acquaintance with art works, there was also a technological and economic matter of national magnitude. Prince Albert considered improvements in design the key to making British fabrics and pottery more competitive in foreign markets. In the 1840s he led a Parliamentary initiative, alongside the Board of Trade, to establish a network of Government Schools of Design and also a Journal of Design and Manufacture. The authors that taught and wrote in those institutions (Owen Jones, Henry Cole, M.D. Wyatt, Richard Redgrave, A.W.N. Pugin, R.N. Wornum, Christopher Dresser, William Dyce) themselves organized the Great Exhibition of 1851, which celebrated and displayed British goods among an international representation of artistic and technical designs, materials and manufactures. They shared the notion that figurative, imitative naturalism is for painting, not ornament. Also by their own practice of the craft, they were self-conscious about the value as well as the artificiality and conventionality of constructions in geometry and modeling (three dimensional and material). This is a lesson that craftsmen and architects and the first half of the nineteenth century more generally learned from both art and science. “Convention” and “construction” became key terms in discussions of scientific and mechanized flat abstractions in design.⁵ Owen Jones’ avowed synthesis of art, science and industry in design captured the new intellectual and social place for design, its writing, teaching, production and consumption; the rise of photography followed a similar path.

Writing in the same vein immediately after the Great Exhibition of 1851, John Stuart Mill discussed in his essay “On Nature” the question of “the construction of the world”, an he noted that the “artificially created or at least artificially perfected nature of the best and noblest human beings, is the only nature which it is ever commendable to follow.”⁶

Also from a cognitive discourse, authors from a recent Romantic, Germanophile tradition—such as Coleridge and Whewell—to a more sustained empiricist and materialist one—such as Bain, Carpenter, Tyndall and Pearson—adopted different variants of a constructive view of knowledge. This kind of view blurred the distinction between facts and constructions and stressed the productive role of the mind.⁷ In fact, in a self-description in answer to a questionnaire from Francis Galton, Maxwell adopted this perspective and attributed to himself a constructive imagination.⁸

Technologies of the period provided a common standard of cognitive anchoring. In particular, they became a source of specific representations of the basic abstract ideas of space, time, matter and causality in order to yield a concrete form of dynamical understanding. One may think of this role of technology and its endorsement as a cognitive version of the technological optimism in British political economy, in which machines constituted extensions of the workers’ body (itself and its capacity to do work understood mechanically or dynamically), extending and enhancing their capacities and utility. This attitude contrasts with a pessimistic approach: it saw machines not as an extending tool but an amputating and alienating system, economically and cognitively.⁹ From the middle-ground, graphic technologies such as design and photography provided protection of the immediate experience and environment from the new larger environment and culture, and an adaptation to it.

The optimistic cognitive standard was recognized and adopted by Maxwell as well as an increasing number of his peers and his audience. Maxwell’s distinctive use of mechanical and architectural models expressed this technological standard; internal, or imaginary, and external, or material representations of this kind were meant to be applied to phenomena beyond the scope of mechanics itself. He reported this now methodological imperative to the Chemical Society in relation to the development of molecular modeling of chemical substances and chemical and thermodynamical phenomena: “We have, in fact, to determine, from the observed external actions of an unseen piece of machinery, its internal construction.”¹⁰

To inquire into phenomena of perception, optical devices were developed and explored in the spirit of meeting the artifactual standard of understanding the natural. The British emphasized the use of optics, while German naturalists focused on physiology. Certainly it was not pure optics. Questions and hypotheses often sprang from individuals with medical education and anatomical interests, e.g. Thomas Young. Still, the predominant medium of research was the world of optical devices, alongside the scientific framework of mathematical and experimental optics and mechanics.¹¹

These two areas were central to the rising institution of science and its education (despite the empirical and social status of medicine, especially...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Shared Media, Differing Projects and Projections
• 2  Enter Maxwell
• 3  Photographic Illustrations
• 4  What Objectivity? Whose Objectivity? Automatic Objectivity Is Social and Scientific
• 5  Photography Organized, Mechanized and Scientific: From Amateurs to Professionals
• 6  Photography as Instrument and Profession: Art versus Science
• 7  Photographic Collaborations: Two More Cases
• 8  Maxwells Pictorial and Photographic Background
• 9  Methodology of Experimental Inaction
• 10  Enter Sutton
• 11  The Place of Collaboration and Chemistry between Men
• 12  Technologies of Projection and Color: Different Problems and Images. Color and Truth
• 13  A Tale of Two Experiments: From Professional to Cognitive Autonomy
• 14  Photographic Consequences
• 15  Conclusion
• References
• Index