Fox

Louis Ducos Du Hauron

ca. 1870 · Three-color assembly print · Photographs

Ducos du Hauron, an amateur physicist and artist, began experimenting with color photography in the early 1860s. By 1868 he had patented a three-color process that he improved upon and published the following year in the treatise Les Couleurs en photographie: solution du problème. His method involved exposing negatives through green, orange-red, and blue-violet filters and then making positives of them on three sheets of gelatin incorporating carbon pigments of primary colors. When superimposed, the three layers made a single color photograph: a technique that is essentially the basis of modern color processes.

Artist

Louis Ducos Du Hauron

Date

ca. 1870

Medium

Three-color assembly print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005