Conclusion

Abstract

Is the Maxwell-Sutton episode part of the history of color photography? In what sense? What led to it? Between Victorian and digital photography, the photographic image has shifted in its manipulated nature and its ambiguous objectivity. The place of the Maxwell-Sutton projection in the history of photography goes beyond the simple claim to being the first color photograph. It hardly met the standard of photographic process and product of its time. It was hardly photographic where colored—the projection—and colored where photographic—the slides. Its nature and significance unfolded in what was then the periphery of the standard that defines the guiding problem of photography. In addition, its outcome went beyond the fixed reproduction of a visual experience. It went beyond the representation of the photographic image produced and projected, towards an exploration of the role of color in perception and optical lenses. The shifting and diverse practices that entangled their way around ideas of photography have not gone away. Digital photography today still challenges the objectivity of the images and the electronic displays project images synthesized through the trichromatic pixels of the retinal model Young and Maxwell endorsed.