Did color in photos start here?
Levi L. Hill was not the most likely fellow to set off a 150-year debate in the photography world. A Baptist preacher in the Catskill village of West Kill, N.Y., he took up photography when chronic bronchitis forced him to leave the ministry. In his second career, he became a traveling daguerreotypist, making portraits on silver-coated metal plates.
But in 1850, an improbable mix of ingenuity, ambition and kitchen chemistry propelled Hill to make a shocking announcement: He had produced the first color daguerreotypes, later known as Hillotypes. News traveled slowly in those days, but in short order Hill is said to have destroyed the booming market for daguerreotype portraits done in plain old black and white.
“It was like the arrival of color television,” says Dusan C. Stulik, senior scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute. “You wouldn’t buy a black-and-white TV after color was available. When he came in and said, ‘I have color,’ he stepped on the livelihood of other photographers.”
Hill had a problem, though, and that’s the reason he is not a household name. He couldn’t -- or wouldn’t -- come up with a set of instructions that other photographers could duplicate.
The controversy over what Hill actually developed continues to this day. But a research project launched by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and carried out with a grant from the Getty Foundation and the expertise of Getty conservation scientists has produced lots of new information.
“The most important question in our scientific investigation was very simple,” Stulik says. “Was he a charlatan or wasn’t he?”
The answer?
“We now know that he was both. He was a genius, but a flawed genius.”
The study, to be presented Nov. 2 to a group called the Daguerreian Society in Kansas City, determined that Hill did devise a way of producing a few natural colors in photographic images. Although the process has yet to be fully explained, the scientists have found that Hill built up layers of metals that reacted to different colors in the spectrum and produced an iridescent effect. But he wasn’t able to get the full spectrum. And he tried to make up for that failure with secret additions, which would ultimately be his downfall.
Hill kept his entire process tightly under wraps. At first he refused to show his pictures publicly, claiming that he had to perfect his methods and file a patent. As demands for proof of his success escalated, he showed examples of his work to leading daguerreotypists, who vouched for his veracity in published testimonials. But suspicions of a hoax grew. And when he finally published “A Treatise on Heliochromy,” in 1856, it didn’t help much.
“My personal feeling, based on the research we have done, is that he was under pressure to publish the process,” Stulik says. “He didn’t have something reliable that would deliver all the colors, so he started to make a smoke screen. His descriptions of the process are so convoluted that, if it didn’t work, he could say, ‘You haven’t done step 377 right.’ ”
Hundreds of his experiments have been lost or destroyed, but in 1933 the Smithsonian received a gift of 62 Hillotypes from the artist’s son-in-law. Difficult to see and too delicate to be exhibited, most of the works are copies of lithographs and paintings; a few are photographs of landscapes. Unloved and rarely examined, the plates languished in storage until a couple of years ago, when they became a priority of Michelle Anne Delaney, an associate curator at the National Museum of American History who oversees the museum’s collection of early photography.
Delaney had supervised in-house research on other parts of the collection, but the Hillotypes called for a team of outside experts. She eventually enlisted Corinne Dune, an independent curator and conservator who had been working on early color photographs at George Eastman House, to do a cursory survey of the Hillotypes. Then Delaney, Dune and Grant Romer, a prominent Daguerreian, began brainstorming about how to do the appropriate scientific analysis.
They drafted a proposal to the Getty Foundation to fund the study and were rewarded with a relatively small but crucial grant of $31,500. While reviewing the application, Antoine M. Wilmering, a foundation program officer, called Stulik, who had done extensive research on early photography.
“I could hear him jumping up and down,” Wilmering says. “It was clear this was a very important project.”
Stulik was eager to be involved because knowledge of traditional photography is fast disappearing in the digital age. “We have a tremendous amount of cultural heritage in the form of chemical photography,” he says. “If you don’t understand those objects, you can’t find a way to conserve and protect them.”
The foundation does not fund Getty projects, so the Conservation Institute paid Stulik and his colleague Art Kaplan to participate. On two trips, last February and August, they took portable testing equipment on a scientific detective mission at the Washington, D.C., museum. Selecting 33 Hillotypes that were in the best condition, the scientists conducted a series of exacting tests to determine the materials Hill used. Although most of the images have a rosy, iridescent cast that shifts with the viewer’s position, there are subtle differences and touches of definite color.
Stulik and Kaplan found no evidence of many chemicals Hill claimed to have used but plenty of proof that he doctored his metal-coated plates with painted pigments. Among them is a white pigment used only in the late 18th and early 19th century, which discounts any possibility that additions were made by some latter-day artist.
There’s much more to be learned about Hill’s methods, Stulik says, but the study has shed considerable light on a pioneer in the history of color photography -- one who whetted Americans’ appetite for color and inspired other photographers’ explorations.
Because they’re so fragile, the Hillotypes won’t be exhibited in conjunction with the research project, but they will be photographed, and results of the collaborative study will be published and put on the Internet, Delaney says.
“The benefit is that researchers will know so much more about the Hillotypes,” she says, “even if they are not on the walls of a museum.”
