Lippmann Colour Photography – AlternativePhotography.com

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1891 Gabriel Lippmann – an inventor and physicist from Luxembourg – invented a process for recording colour photographs. The result is beautiful colour photographs with high resolution. Professor Hans I. Bjelkhagen shares with us how it works.

Writer and photography / Dr. Hans I. Bjelkhagen

Few photographers today are familiar with the name Gabriel Lippmann (1845-1921), even fewer have seen a Lippmann colour photograph. Lippmann was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of Interference Photography, an early colour technique exploiting the phenomenon of optical standing waves. Lippmann’s prize represents the only time this prestigious award has been given for a photographic invention. However, the process proved difficult and impractical, exposures ran into minutes, the colours were difficult to view and almost impossible to copy. Only a minority of photographers recorded successful Lippmann photographs. Those who did were skilled in making and coating their own emulsions and dedicated many years to the cultivation of the technique. Despite the difficulties, Lippmann’s photography remains, to this day, the only direct process of true colour photography known. It is a technique of exquisite beauty, both technically and aesthetically. The ultra- fine grain plates, essential to the medium, display the highest photographic resolution ever achieved. The encoding of colour, as a periodic volume diffraction grating of pure silver offers excellent and unrivaled archival longevity.

History of Lippmann Photography

Gabriel Lippmann, professor of mathematical physics at the Sorbonne invented, demonstrated and mathematically formulated the process of interference colour photography, also known as interferential photography, or Lippmann photography, in the years 1891-1894. The process exploits the formation of standing light waves, by means of a mirror, and records these in a single-layer, panchromatic, ultra-fine grain, but black-and-white photographic emulsion.

Figure 1. The principle of Lippmann photography<br>The principle of Lippmann photography is illustrated in Fig. 1. An ordinary plate camera is used to form an image on the photographic plate. But the plate is loaded backwards with the emulsion side placed away from the lens and in optical contact with a mirror of mercury. The incident light waves interfere with their own reflections forming a standing wave pattern within the volume of the emulsion, with a periodic spacing of λ/(2n) that has to be resolved and recorded (λ is the wavelength of light in air and n is the refractive index of the emulsion). The colour information is stored locally in this way. The larger the separation between the fringes, the longer is the wavelength of the recorded light. When the developed photograph is viewed in white light, different parts of the recorded image produce different colours. This is due to the separation of the recorded fringes.

In this way Lippmann’s photographs reproduce all the monochromatic components registered on them. Since wavelength is relative to colour the spectra corresponding to the original scene can be reproduced with formidable accuracy, unlike any other colour photograph.

Figure 2. Lippmann photograph by Neuhauss, recorded in 1899<br>(Collection: Royal Photographic Society)<br>August and Louis Lumière (1893, 1897), Eduard Valenta (1912), Richard Neuhauss (1898), and Hans Lehmann (1908) contributed extensively to progress in this field. In Fig. 2, a Lippmann plate by Neuhauss is reproduced. The Lumière brothers made the first silver-gelatin emulsions for the process and produced the first ever colour portrait. The first Lippmann photographers had to make and coat their own emulsions. This was a very skilled craft, as the crystals in the emulsion had to be extremely fine-grain if any colours were to be recorded. Standard plate cameras of the time were suitable for recording Lippmann photographs. It was only the dark-slides which had to be adapted to flow mercury behind the emulsion. The processing of the colour photographs was done in a similar way by most of the photographers. They used a developer based on pyrogallol and ammonia, which was formulated to suit the particular emulsion. There was very little interest in making emulsions for Lippmann photography after this type of colour photography was succeeded by the Autochrome process introduced in 1907.

Modern Lippmann Photography

Recent progress in the development of colour holography has opened up the possibility to reinvestigate Lippmann’s photography. Modern examples of interference colour photography have been made using improved panchromatic ultra-fine grain recording materials combined with special processing techniques.

The Recording Material

Ultra-fine grain...