Reflecting Nature: Chemistry and Comprehensibility in Gabriel Lippmann’s ‘physical’ Method of Photographing Colours

The origins of colour photography are typically traced to mid-nineteenth-century ‘threecolour’ processes based on a mixture of three primary colours. At the time, however, images produced by these means were pejoratively labelled ‘photographs in colours’ and not ‘colour photographs’ because they did not result solely from the direct action of light. In 1891, the French physicist Gabriel Lippmann claimed to have developed a direct, ‘physical’ method of colour photography, which the French industrialists Auguste and Louis Lumière subsequently improved. This article charts the rise and fall of so-called ‘interferometric’ colour photography and evaluates Lippmann’s suppression of the chemical aspects of his work, in the context of his award of the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics.