Coming Attraction: The Event of Color, Techniques of Screening and Filtering in Early “Natural” Color Film and Photography

Rachel Lee Hutcheson

Eastman Kodak, “Kodacolor Demonstration Party,” 1928. Kodacolor. Still from digital video. George Eastman (left) and Thomas Edison (right). Image courtesy of the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York.

Grey Room 96
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Citation

Rachel Lee Hutcheson, “Coming Attraction: The Event of Color, Techniques of Screening and Filtering in Early “Natural” Color Film and Photography,” Grey Room, no. 96 (Summer 2024): 6–29.

Filed under media, politics

Abstract

The dream of color and its manifested reality at the turn of the twentieth century characterized an era of expansive color diversity. The desire to reproduce “all the colors of nature” resulted in several color processes termed “natural color” in photography and film that used operations of optical filtering; that is, the filtering of and recombination of light using the primary colors: red, blue, and green.