Pressrelease Fotocolor

Fotocolor 2004 - Norsk museum for fotografi - Preus fotomuseum's summer exhibition in
Horten - shows the development of colour photography from its humble beginnings right up
to some of the most advanced equipment used today. Almost 60 historical colour cameras
have been unearthed from the museum's stores and will be displayed with explanatory
texts along with examples of various ingenious and at times eccentric ideas that have been
launched over the years in order to solve the challenges of colour photography.

Ten years have passed since the Norwegian government resolved to acquire Preus
Fotomuseum. Even though the current museum is in no way identical to the private museum
at the time, there is little doubt that the museum would not have existed as it is today, and
would not have been situated in Horten, had it not been for Leif Preus. For this reason, it is
only natural that Leif Preus should be curator of this year's exhibition.

Part of the reason for calling the exhibition Fotocolor was because this phrase is easily
recognisable in large areas of the world and in a number of languages. Fotocolor was also
the name of one of the first companies in Norway to produce colour photographs on paper
at the end of the 1930s. And one of the exhibits is an excellent photograph of flowers that
is of such a quality that it could easily have been photographed today. Kjell Sten Tollefsen
(1913-2002), one of the exhibition's two main exhibitors, worked in the Fotocolor company
at this time. The other main exhibitor is Knut Bry (b. 1946), the renowned Norwegian
fashion photographer.

Colour photography was first demonstrated when James Clerk-Maxwell, the renowned
physicist, did so at the Royal Institution in London on 17 May 1861. This experiment will be
repeated in Fotomuseum's exhibition, together with other exciting demonstrations.

It wasn't until 1907, however, that photographic plates became widely available on the
market, making colour photography within reach of the man in the street. These plates
went under the name Autochrome, a Danish invention whereby black and white emulsion
coated with coloured grains of starch produced coloured slides. In Norway, too, this
process was in fairly widespread use. The exhibition contains examples of beautiful
stereoscopic (three-dimensional) coloured photographs taken by architect Grendahl using
the Autocrome process, partly using home-made equipment.

The next breakthrough came in 1938 with the launch of the Kodachrome process, which
gave 24x26-format slides, mounted in paper frames ready for projection. After the Second
World War, negative colour film for producing paper copies were launched, but it wasn't until
the end of the 1960s that the turning point came that made colour photography easily
available to all.

Today the dominant form of photography is digital photography, in which the traditional
film containing a coating of silver nitrate has been replaced with a chip consisting of
semi-conductors that register the motif as pixels, which can then be processed by computer
and copied and manipulated in countless ways. The exhibition uses examples to describe
and highlight the difference between these two photographic methods.

The rarest colour photographs in the world. One of the display cabinets in the exhibition
shows a couple of the rarest colour photographic processes in the world, most notably
several unique Lippmann photographs based on the phenomenon of interference. These
colour photographs contain no traces of colour at all; instead they reproduce the entire
spectrum of colours directly using lightwaves that are reflected twice from the same point,
with the distance between the reflected light corresponding to the wavelengths of the
Slide shows: Non-stop slide shows will present excellent examples of photographs used
in nature photography, astronomical photography, landscape photography photo reporting
etc. Work is underway to produce a programme of lectures and demonstrations. Further
information will be made available in the press and on the museum's web site.

PRESS IMAGES/OTHER INFORMATION:

Additional press images are available at www.foto.museum.no. Press images may be sent electronically or by regular mail.

High-resolution images: Monika Jensen Tel. +47 3303 1634

If you have further queries, please contact by e-mail: Astrid Roberg or Hanne Holm-Johnsen

©Knut Bry
S.S. Norway, 2/25, 1984
03

©Knut Bry
California, 2/25, 1985
01

©Knut Bry, Uten tittel [kvinneben ved basseng], 1983
02

©Kjell Sten Tollefsen
Pensjonspensler, 1992
06