The Prince of Humbugs

摘要

In 1851, the art of photography was barely a decade old, and American .. daguerreotypists reading The Photographic Art-Journal could still expect some kind of innovation every month. But the January 1851 issue had a shocker: "We learn with pleasure that Mr L. Hill has succeeded in impressing the image upon the daguerreotype plate in all the beauty and brilliance of the natural colors." Natural colours in photographs had been ardently hoped tor ever since the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839. In their absence, customers demanded hand-tinting, a practice that made photographers cringe. A few inventors managed unnatural blotches of colour on exposures - a red here, a blue there ― but they bore little relation to the colour of the original. Natural colours were unattainable until Hill began to produce Hillotypes-like this one of an old colour engraving. The Reverend Levi Hill's remarkable career had an unusual start. Born in New York in 1816, he had pledged himself to the ministry after falling through the ice on the Hudson River and miraculously re-emerging through an air hole. But years of sermonising in draughty churches wrecked his health with chronic bronchitis, from which he found relief only after inadvertently breathing in a lungful of bromine fumes in a daguerreotyping lab. Hill went on to write one of the first books on daguerreotyping, and had been secretly working on colour photography for two years when an indiscreet friend blurted out word of his success to the editor of The Photographic-Art Journal. Hill remained a nervous and sickly man, unready for fame, but he confirmed the rumour to the Journal: "The discovery will completely supersede daguerreotyping... Among my forty-five specimens, I have the following: A VIEW, containing a red house, green grass and foliage, the wood-color of the trees, several different shades of red and brindle, colored garments on a clothes line, blue sky, and the faint blue of the atmosphere."