Join us for a two-week celebration of colour photography. Hear from artists, academics, curators and researchers working with colour photography, historically and today.

Through a series of online talks and ‘in conversations’, we will consider a range of processes, exhibitions, inventors, photographers and artists, spanning the nineteenth century to the present day. All talks will take place online and ticket holders will receive a link to join in advance of the event.
Artist in Conversation events should be booked separately. For further information about the events and speakers, please see the programme.

Supported by The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation and hosted in collaboration with the V&A Research Institute.

Cloths of Gold and Experiments on Light

This paper takes two Scottish women of science, Elizabeth Fulhame (fl. 1794) and Mary Somerville (1780 – 1872) and explores their contribution to the field of early colour photography. As marginalised women in the sciences, Fulhame and Somerville were gendered intruders whose works represent disruptive case studies of early colour photography. This paper explores their output and sets it against the silences of the archive, where their colour photochemical experiments exist only in written word and the readers’ imagination. It asks what happens when women’s agency is inscribed in the published form but the colour object of study remains absent. To address these silences and absences, the paper brings research and art practice together: when the coloured silks and fibres of paper no longer exist; when the iodized and sensitized brush work and the finger-prints are no longer there to study, how might re-enactment become a method for critical inquiry? In the artistic recreation of their experiments, a physical encounter emerges. So too does a methodology that can perhaps offer us an understanding of the perception and experience of colour and photo chemicals in this earliest of periods – sixty-seven years before James Clerk Maxwell’s declaration of colour photography. By studying and re-enacting Fulhame and Somerville, this paper goes in search of the traces and invisibilities of women’s work in early colour photography.