Frederic Eugene Ives - Color Photography

Color Photography

Ives was a pioneer in the field of color photography. He first demonstrated a system of natural color photography at the 1885 Novelties Exposition of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. His fully developed Kromskop (long-vowel marks over both "o"s and pronounced "chrome-scope") color photography system was commercially available in England by late 1897 and in the US about a year later. Three separate black-and-white photographs of the subject were taken through carefully adjusted red, green and blue filters, a method of photographically recording color first suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855 and imperfectly demonstrated in 1861, but subsequently forgotten and independently reinvented by others. Transparent positives of the three images were then viewed in Ives' Kromskop, in which red, green and blue filters and transparent reflecting surfaces served to visually combine the three images into one full-color image. Both monocular and stereoscopic Kromskop viewers were made. Prepared sets of images, named Kromograms, were sold for viewing in them. Alternatively, a Kromskop projector could be used to exactly superimpose the three images, each illuminated by light of the appropriate color, on a projection screen. Special cameras and camera attachments were sold to prospective "Kromskopists" who wanted to create their own Kromograms. The quality of the color was highly praised but the system was not a commercial success. It was discontinued around 1907 when the Autochrome process, which was simple to use and required no special equipment, appeared on the market.

In 2009, several Kromogram views of San Francisco made by Ives six months after the 1906 earthquake and fire were discovered while cataloging a collection of Kromograms at the National Museum of American History. They are believed to be the only existing images showing the aftermath of that disaster in natural color (i.e., with color recorded and reproduced photographically rather than added in by hand), as well as the earliest extant natural color photographs of San Francisco.