Introduction: Shared Media, Differing Projects and Projections

Abstract

This chapter introduces a new account of the interest in photography from the physicist James Clerk Maxwell and the photographer Thomas Sutton and of their alleged contribution to the birth of color photography. Color photography was a tool to explore and explain different properties and uses of color light. The collaboration between Maxwell and Sutton was an episode of two projects. The book offers a critical account, social, intellectual and material, of an episode in a tangle of several histories: of the identity of photographic practice and its outcomes, representation, experimentation, fixity, objectivity, collaboration, and the art/science and natural/artificial dichotomies. The argument emphasizes the role of criteria for colored and photographic images, Victorian technological cultures of visual representation, Maxwell’s and Sutton’s researches and resouces, and the relation between photographers, artists and scientists.