In the 1730s, a French monk, Louis Bertrand Castel, invented a color
‘clavecin.” Following a suggestion by Athanasius Kircher that arrangements of
colors corresponded to arrangements of sounds, the clavecin was designed to
create color harmonies synchronized
to music. That Kircher was invoked should tell us that Castel was an
anti-Newtonian, which he was -- il doutait 'que Monsieur Newton n'eut jamais
manié de prisme' – of the profound sort – Castel, like Kircher, still lived in
a world in which science was an exquisite web of analogies. The kind of
reductionism and mathematical method that Newton applied, without any
pre-determining analogies, seemed like a desecration of that web. Blake had
that same sentiment a century later, although by then the pre-modern understanding
of nature had been irreversibly lost, along with the culture that sustained it.
Castel’s example influenced the ever-peculiar Russian composer, Scriabin, in
the 20th century.
Newton’s prism is, from a certain positivist perspective, a step on the road to
color film. In America, the first “commercially viable” color photography film
came out in 1907. It was called Autochrome. In John Rohrbach’s history of the
inventions of color photography, he notes that Stieglitz was, at first, a fan.
But the color photograph did not smoothly replace the black and white as one
might expect.
“Almost immediately, it became apparent that photographic
color delivered a world that was simultaneously too real and not real enough.
Discerning eyes found a surreal brittleness in the spot-on renderings delivered
by most well-exposed color photographs, as if the air had just been sucked out
of their subjects. They recognized that photographic colors would pull forward
or recede, not fully adhering to the objects they described…”
Interestingly, in the early twentieth century, in which the
object lost its “aura”, the most recognizable objective correlate was the black
and white photograph or film. Aura, in this sense, created a certain visual equilibrium
that the color process could not compete with. Color was too busy. The crowd’s desire
for a perfect mimesis was frustrated by the addition of an element that the 20-20
members of the crowd saw in every waking moment.
With Kodak’s invention of Kodachrome – the beta version – in
the late thirties, and its innovations in the 1940s, color film became a tool
not only of trained photographers, but of the masses. Color in moving film
followed.
And thus the visual media that people received, the world of
black and white films and photographs, changed around them, with black and
white becoming something other than the standard.
This has a psychological interest for the historian. The historian’s
work, the archives, the statistics, the newspapers, the memoirs, etc. – all of
that stuff – is accompanied, of course, by the historian’s imagination. And how
does the 21st century historian imagine, say, Paris in 1920? In
color or in black and white? Or in a mix of both?
Compare two pics: The
first is recognizably the in the vein of the realist turn in the Great
Depression in America, Edward Weston’s 1932 Monterey coast picture, all so starkly
black and white and the greys running out to the horizon. In my childhood,
going on “cartrips” to North Georgia, you would always see plenty of abandoned
shacks. It was all in the American grain, get up and go, leave the house, the
lean-to, to rot, the sharecropper cabin, get in the truck with the furniture
you were saving stacked in the bed, roped down, and get the hell outta dodge. Here,
of course, Weston is tickling with the surface elements of the sublime: ocean
and thunderclouds behind, the weathered and beaten structure – a fishing shack? – in front, performing its slow
routine tumble into the seagrass.
A place for bums to
spend the night. The black and white and grey do a lot of work for the eye and
the imagination here. We know someone must have worked to put the roof on, to
punch in the doors and windows, but that work is, in this moment, all over and
futile. The waves slamming into the
rocks jutting up on the shore are eroding them, sure, but the comparison
between their stony time and the time of the fence almost completely gone
framing whatever that bit of land was –
a pea patch, a place for goats – is stark. The fence is pointless. The
distances are preserved, the coolness of just this moment is a black n white job.
The second is post-war. Cities have been targets, photos
have gone through the technological revolution wrought by Kodak, the atom bomb
has fallen and colors now come out of our photos and films. 1946, of the water front in Monterey, California, Edward Weston. In 2014, we drove up the coast and spent the
night at Monterey out of respect for Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. It was not the
town I read about when I was a teen – although when I was a teen, back in the
1970s, maybe that town still existed. I knew it wouldn’t be. We did hit the
place in a storm, and that was nice to see out of the hotel window.
It was not, also, Weston’s town from this photograph. We
know those colors more from old
photographs than from the colors we see in the world.
It is of some interest that historians of, say, Monterey or
California or of the Great Depression or of the Post-war have at hand such
pictures, and that the color photographs of this time remind us of color
photographs, while the black and whites remind us of the objects we see in
them.
We start here because we want to touch the folk science of
color -- the system of folk beliefs that contain schematics for the
correspondence of color to words, sounds, moods, crimes and virtues.
Nostalgia, I think, has changed in subtle ways in tandem
with the media of representation. To be nostalgic for the ancien regime means
being nostalgic for a very static set of paintings and museum style
installations in castles, etc. To be nostalgic for the 1930s in America, to me,
means being nostalgic for the America that ghosts through in black and white.
And to be nostalgic for the fifties means longing for the technocolor world, or
the Kodochrome world. If the first world is of our self, our damned cogito, and
the second world is for what is out there, direct phenomena, the third world,
the world of representation, is a definite mediator of the past that sometimes
tricks us into thinking we can see the past. I’ve often wondered why nobody has,
I think, really made a research object out of exploring how the optical values of the
historical iconography spill over into our larger historical imagination.
It isn’t simply that black and white is a color scheme – as human things,
colors in their mutual relations one with the other have human significances
even as they do the "job" of blocking in figures that philosophers
assign to them. There’s an old philosophical bias towards the figural and
against color. Color is considered accidental, transitory, way too mutable.
Here the old schematic bias, the old logocentrism, as Derrida puts it, flashes
into sight and as quickly vanishes.
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