While on vacation in upstate New York, I happened across a secluded antique shop. Inside I found a wonderful old steamer trunk and bought it for forty dollars. When I got it home and inspected it I found in one of the drawers a small wooden box. I lifted it out and immediately noticed it had weight to it. This small wooden box contained sixteen, four inch squares of glass, wrapped in fine yellowed paper, and neatly packaged in sets of two. Upon closer inspection, and to my infinite delight, I discovered that each plate contained a three-inch circular photograph.
Within the circles I could see barren trees and stately buildings, like small worlds captured in glass. At that moment I knew I found something special, something very old, and I was instantly intrigued. I knew I had a magnificent mystery on my hands, waiting to be solved. Carefully removing each set of plates, I discovered a brittle letter. My heart thumped with expectation. The letter was written by Miss Polly Anna Pennypiece in 1889 and addressed to Mrs. Mary Kitchner. I have reprinted the relevant sections here:
My dearest Mary,
Upon hearing of your spring marriage, I must admit that I was filled with many conflictions. The announcement of your engagement was happy, welcome news; but your fiancé’s decision to take you across the ocean truly saddens me. I will miss you dearly my lovely cousin, my precious Mary, and I hope that you will someday return to our beloved home…
This letter will accompany your wedding present. Please accept this gift as it is a most cherished possession. You have been like a daughter to me, so I wish you to have it. I hope that you cherish it as much as I do, as it was made by your inventive grandfather, Thomas Sutton, and given to me by the famous scientist James Clerk Maxwell.
I first met Mr. Maxwell, at Cambridge, when I was a young girl of sixteen. Your grandfather had taken me to see him on account of Mr. Maxwell’s investigations into the nature of colour-blindness. You see, I was of particular interest to Mr. Maxwell because girls who are color-blind are extraordinarily rare.
When I arrived at Cambridge with Uncle Thomas, Mr. Maxwell performed many experiments on me, but I did not mind much because he was so kind and handsome. He spun a coloured top and asked me what color I saw. Then he had me sit in a sort of dark chamber with only one window, each pane being made of coloured glass, which could be covered and mixed in marked proportion. I must admit that it was quite romantic; or so I thought then, when I was young and curios.
Although my time at Cambridge was short, it was quite memorable and productive. James Maxwell won the Rumford Medal for his work on colour-vision. In gratitude for my assistance, he asked your grandfather to make a special camera, which he presented to me for my eighteenth birthday. It captured the world in the colours to which I alone am sensitive. Uncle showed me how to use it, and I excited carried the bulky thing everywhere I went. That winter I made scores of exposures, a dozen of which Uncle Thomas made into slides. The camera was unfortunately destroyed during a fire at the studio, but I had the slides with me on holiday and they survived. They now belong to you, my dearest Mary, and my fervent hope is that during the long, cold, home-sick winter nights, you and your husband will be comforted by these views of home.
With love and farewell, your beloved,
Polly Anna Pennypiece
Having finished reading the letter, I found myself in utter disbelief. Granting it wasn’t a hoax, I held in my hand evidence of the world’s first color-blind, color photographer. Could it be that a story this important to the history of photography has been lost for so long? What unbelievable luck for me, a student of the history of photography, to find such a treasure! Surely it is a miracle that these fragile glass slides have survived fire, an ocean voyage, and who knows what other catastrophes, only to find their way into my hands.
After some exhausting research, I came to the conclusion that Polly’s Uncle Thomas is in fact Thomas Sutton, the nineteenth century photographer and inventor. A prolific writer on photographic theory, he is credited with creating a unique water-filled, fish-eye lens for use in the first panoramic camera (1858) and he also invented the first single-lens reflex camera (1862).
His collaboration with James Clerk Maxwell, renowned Scottish physicist, on the world’s first color photograph (1861) is seen as the conceptual moment of modern color photography. The idea grew from James Clerk Maxwell’s 1855 work entitled “A Theory of Colour Vision: With Some Notes on Colour-blindness”, in which Maxwell showed that all visible colors can be made by combinations of only three colors of light: red, blue, and green. He therefore concluded that human vision is only sensitive to those three colors and he proved it by showing that colorblind people are the way they are because they can only see two of those three colors.
In his 1861 experiment, Maxwell asked Thomas Sutton to take three black-and-white photographs of a Scottish “Tartan Ribbon”, each through a filter of red, blue, or green. Three slides were made from the negatives, which were then projected through the same color filter as they were photographed. By overlapping the projections, an image in full, nature color is revealed.
Making three separate, correct exposures of the same object was a complicated task with the equipment available in the 1860’s, which is why color photography was not popularly practiced until the next century. Discovering that Polly could only see two of the three colors, Maxwell must have realized the relative simplicity of making a two color camera that photographed the world the way that only Polly could see it. Stereographic cameras that made two exposures simultaneously were already being produced by dozens of manufactures in the 1860’s, among them Thomas Sutton. Even though Polly’s camera was destroyed, the unique nature of the photographs gives us clues to the design of the camera. It was most likely cobbled together from the spare parts scattered around his studio. I believe that Thomas Sutton created the first and only, two-color, water-filled fisheye lens stereographic camera.
This exhibition presents us with the unique vision of Polly Anna Pennypiece, a young woman whose color-blindness and family connections led her to be a woman of many firsts. Not just the world’s first color-blind, color photographer, but also inadvertently the very first anaglyphic photographer. Anaglyph is a technical name for a 3-D photograph, in which two images taken from slightly different angles are printed on the same paper, one in red, and one in cyan (blue-green). The 3-D movies of the 1950’s saw the heyday of anaglyphs but the first known example of anaglyphic photography was made by Louis Du Hauron in 1891. I believe that neither Polly, nor her Uncle Thomas had any idea that they were making anaglyphs. Even so, this should not diminish the importance of Polly Anna Pennypiece’s unique work nor rob her of her rightful place in the history of photography.
The photographs in this exhibition were made from contact negatives of the original slides. This allowed me to work freely without damaging the one-hundred-and-forty year old glass plates. Each Pollygraph is created by exposing one piece of color photographic paper under two separate enlargers. Several registration proofs are required for each finished, unique print, making their creation splendidly laborious.
Jeffrey Steven Moser ©2007
"Photography is yet in its infancy, and it offers to the intelligent amateur a field for readily gaining distinction as the author of valuable experiments. Let him consider whether he will occupy his spare time and cash in producing photographs of more or less merit and which may be doomed to fade before his eyes, or whether he will employ the same opportunities to advance the art."
Thomas Sutton 1857
"Pollygraphs" artist statement
The ideas behind the Pollygraphs Series grew naturally and spontaneously from my research into the origins of color photography. The very first color photograph was of a multi-colored, Scottish Tartan Ribbon made in 1855 by Thomas Sutton under the direction of James Clerk Maxwell. Through his scientific research on color vision, Maxwell uncovered the three color principle of the human eye, thereby paving the way for future color photography. That he chose to photograph a fancy bow as his subject and did not pursue color photography after this one photograph intrigued me. I began thinking about the subject matter and about perhaps expanding on his early experiments. Thoughts of fabrics and bows led me to recollections of my mother, a seamstress in her younger years, and the piles of fabric in her sewing room. The invention of a daughter or niece of color photography’s founder was an organic result of my feminine associations with fabrics and color. To photograph from a feminine perspective was the daunting challenge that I assigned to myself. Studies of the works of female photographers like Julia Margaret Cameron inspired and directed this perspective. That, in the end, she would become the niece of Thomas Sutton was the unexpected consequence of the passion that arose between the fictitious Polly Pennypiece and real James Maxwell. Her colorblindness, which was the reason for their association, would have been studied in long sessions in his color chamber, a small room in which various amounts of colored light entered the only window. The notion of a romance, or at the very least a flirtation, seemed inevitable under those conditions.
Originally I envisioned the work as vast barren, winter landscapes—conceptual fabric studies (early experiments with the two color process produced subtle textures of green-grey and red earth and striking swatches of blue sky)—but evolved into photographs of things: a twisting, reaching apple tree, a statue of a politician holding a top hat, a manor house in winter, a sled abandoned in the snow. The wintry, snowy landscapes are metaphors for the loneliness felt as a forgotten female photographer and the circular aspect a metaphor for the unique vision, presented as a portal, a cherished Christmas ornament, or a magical snow globe.
The title of the work began as “Maxwell’s Daughter,” then it became “Maxwell’s Niece”, and then “AnnaGlyphs”, which is a play on the word anaglyph, a red-blue 3D image. The revelation of the symbolically layered title “Pollygraphs” came as an epiphany after a long work session. While referencing the fashion of early photographers to self title their processes, for example the Daguerreotype or the Talbotype, “Pollygraphs” also describes the process itself (from Greek poly- meaning many), in which two images are layered. The third reference of the title is to the polygraph test, literally the multi-graph recording of a person’s physiological responses under questioning. By making connections to this well known lie-detector test I intend to prompt questions in the viewing audience of the authenticity of the artist claims. Openly presented as a fictional history, I conceive the ultimate beauty in my work as the suspension of the audience between believing something is true and being told outright that it is not. The suspension is meant as a reminder of childhood, of the time when we began to learn that not all that we see and hear is true.