The Worlding of Light and Air: Dufaycolor and Selochrome in the 1930s

Abstract

During the 1930s, new photographic technologies and practices addressed the difficulties of dealing with different kinds of climate, in Britain and her colonies. This article draws on archival material associated with two brands of photographic film manufactured in England by Ilford Limited: Selochrome and Dufaycolor. It describes these films as involved in a process of ‘worlding’, and as part of a ‘photography complex’ which produces the tropics and the British seaside as testing grounds for photography. Worlding involves the harnessing of light and air, the recalibration of bodies, the redistribution of sensory experiences and the production of new materialities.

Keywords:

• photography industry
• worlding
• colour film
• Dufaycolor
• Ilford
• tropics
• actinism
• body culture

Acknowledgements

The Ilford material used in this research is housed in archives at Redbridge Museum and Heritage Centre, Ilford; the Science and Industry Museum, Manchester; and the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. Additional archives used were the Walgreen Boots Alliance Archives in Nottingham, and the Kodak Limited archive at the British Library, London. Thanks to all the archivists and collections officers for their help on this project, especially Dawn Galer, Emma Burgham, Kendra Bean, Judith Wright and Jayesh Tailor. Thanks to colleagues at the APP4 conference in St Petersburg, for pointing out the need to situate Ilford’s promotional material in relation to body culture, and to Rowan Lear for her company and her insights on our shared trips to various archives. Sincere thanks too, to the editor and two anonymous reviewers whose recommendations were both timely and helpful. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under Grant AH/R014639/1.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A notable exception is Mikuriya, A History of Light.

2. By the late 1930s, Kodak and Ilford had 90% of the market. See Edgerton ‘Industrial Research in the British Photographic Industry’, and Hercock and Jones Silver by the Ton.

3. Sanders, T.D., ‘Sensitometric Tests on Selo and Kodak Roll-Films’.

4. Dufaycolor cine film was marketed by the Spicer-Dufay company from 1932. By 1935, Ilford was in control of the process, and it introduced Dufaycolor transparency film for photographers. In 1937, Ilford gave the marketing and promotion of the film to a newly formed company – Dufay-Chromex – though Ilford remained the wholesaler. Availability of Dufaycolor can be gleaned from Boots the Chemist’s Merchandise Bulletins available in the Walgreens Boots Alliance archive and from articles such as Armstrong, ‘Kew Gardens in Colour’.

5. Tickner Edwardes, ‘Water Babies’.

6. Hevia, ‘The Photography Complex’.

7. Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts’, 260.

8. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 43.

9. Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur’, 253.

10. Ibid., 252–3. Spivak treats ‘worlding’ as both a textual and material process: she refers to ‘dispatches, letters, consultations moving at the slow pace of horse, foot, ships laboriously rounding the Cape, and the quill pens of writers and copyists’, and to Captain Geoffrey Birch’s letter ‘taking its time travelling five hundred odd miles across the Indo-Gangetic plains’ while Birch himself is ‘riding about in the Hills… engaged in consolidating the self of Europe by obliging the native to cathect the space of the Other on his home ground.’ Worlding happens in letters and on horseback.

11. For useful discussions of media and Heidegger’s concept of ‘world disclosure’ see Gunkel and Taylor, Heidegger and the Media, and Frosh, The Poetics of Digital Media.

12. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 44–7.

13. Dominick LaCapra cited in Spivak ‘The Rani of Sirmur’, 250.

14. Said, The World, The Text and The Critic, 176.

15. Arnold, ‘The Place of ‘The Tropics’ in Western Medical Ideas’, 303–6.

16. Ibid., 307.

17. Ibid., 308–9.

18. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 5.

19. Jackson, ‘The Eclipse of the Sun’, 11.

20. Dykes, ‘Photography in Tropical West Africa’, 310. The term ‘ju-jube’ refers to a sticky, gum-like confectionery, named after its original ingredient the jujube fruit, which grows wild in parts of the tropics (notably in the Caribbean) and is cultivated widely across Asia. But, as one of the anonymous reviewers pointed out, ‘ju-jube’ also suggests ‘ju-ju’, a term that describes West African religious fetish practices.

21. Ibid., 310.

22. The Ilford-Selo Record 1935–36.

23. Steer, ‘Dufaycolor in Warm Climates’, 812.

24. Ibid. The ‘reseau’ refers to the fine grid of colour printed on the celluloid characteristic of the Dufay process.

25. ‘Dufaycolor Processing in the Tropics’, 519.

26. Dykes, ‘Photography in Tropical West Africa’, 310 (his emphasis).

27. Jenkins, J. S. ‘Bromoil in the Tropics’, 521.

28. Farmer, H.F. ‘Photography in the Tropics’, 748.

29. ‘Dufaycolor: Everybody’s Color Film’.

30. ‘Dufaycolor Roll Film and Film Pack’ .

31. ‘The Rolleiflex in the Tropics’.

32. Ilford-Selo Record, Issue 1, 1.

33. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 6.

34. Morgan, The Complete Photographer, 53.

35. ‘The Camera on the Coast’, 21.

36. ‘Actinism’, The National Magazine, Vol. 1, 1857, 181–83.

37. Woodruff, The Effects of Tropical Light, 10.

38. Ibid. 3–4.

39. Ibid. 236. Woodruff memorably claims that the decay of ancient Greek civilization was due to the poor adaption of ‘blond Greeks’ to the Greek climate, citing as evidence of racial degeneration Socrates’ ‘lecherous countenance’ and Diogenes ‘defiance of all the decencies of life’.

40. Casson, The Story of Artificial Silk, 92–3, cited in Bourke, ‘The Great Male Renunciation’, 26.

41. Bourke, ‘The Great Male Renunciation’, 27.

42. See Macdonald, ‘Body and Self.’; Zweiniger-Bargielowska ‘Building a British Superman’.

43. Carter, Rise and Shine, 45; Macdonald ‘Body and Self’.

44. ‘Dufaycolor Cine Film 9.5mm and 16mm’, and ‘Dufaycolor Roll Film and Film Pack’.

45. Guillory, ‘Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet Society’; Rau, ‘The Fascist Body Beautiful’.

46. Luckin, ‘The heart and home of horror’, 40; 44–5.

47. Hiley, ‘Hints to Newsfilm Cameramen’.

48. In 1889, when Alfred Harman established his factory in Ilford, the population was 7,000 and the factory was surrounded by green fields on three sides. By 1900 the population had grown to 20,000. Hercock and Jones, Silver by the Ton, 47.

49. Thorsheim, ‘The Paradox of Smokeless Fuels’, 394–5, 386.

50. Catford ‘Our first 75 years’, 49–50.

51. Otter, The Victorian Eye, 136 and 162.

52. Ibid, 166–7.

53. Woodruff, The Effects of Tropical Light, 17 and 109–110. He also cites a Dr Gianni Busck, who argued that certain substances in human blood (such as the anti-malarial quinine, taken by white people in the tropics) increased the sensitivity of the individual to actinic light and compared this to the dye sensitizers used in photographic emulsions to increase its sensitivity to different parts of the spectrum, though Woodruff is sceptical of this claim. Ibid, 124.

54. Saleeby cited in Bourke, ‘The Great Male Renunciation’, 26.

55. This is clear from the 1920s and 1930s editions of the Merchandise Bulletin of Boots the Chemist, as well as its in-house staff magazine The Bee. Both publications are held at the Walgreen Boots Alliance Archive.

56. Carter Rise and Shine, 52.

57. Ibid., 61–2.

58. See Walton, The British Seaside, 100.

59. By the 1930s, tourist photography in the tropics was big business. In 1930 the influential colour photographer Agnes B. Warburg reported in the BJP on a cruise to the West Indies, where she observed the fellow-passengers using roll-film folding cameras, Leica-style cameras and even shooting colour films. The ship’s official photographers, she claims ‘dealt with over 600 roll-films for D. and P. [developing and printing] during the cruise’ as well as making their own photographic record. Warburg herself attempted to develop her own films on board ship, before deciding to save them to develop in England. Warburg, ‘Roll-Films, Film-Packs, and the User’, 239.

60. ‘The Camera on the Coast’, 21.

61. Winston ‘A Whole Technology of Dyeing’, 105–8, drawing on Wollen, ‘Cinema And Technology’, 24.

62. Winston ‘A Whole Technology of Dyeing’, 109.

63. Ibid., 120–1.

64. Davide Panagia explains the distinction thus: ‘The term dispositif imagines a technical instrument as a device for the production of relational arrangements and precisely not an apparatus for the reproduction of transcendental homologies’– as opposed to the Althusserian apparatus theory, which treats media as an ‘influence machine’, shaping values and ideology. Panagia, Rancière’s Sentiments, 28.

65. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 12.

66. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 102.

67. The British Journal of Photography, 179.

68. Saunders, ‘Dufaycolor Photography for the Amateur Worker’, np.

69. Gunning, ‘Colorful metaphors’, 249.

70. ‘Dufaycolor Cine Film 9.5mm and 16mm’, np.

71. ‘Dufaycolor for Miniature Cameras’, 1. The description of colours and imagined scene is almost identical to a passage in Goodsall, On Holiday with a Camera,46.

72. ‘Dufaycolor for Miniature Cameras’, 1.

73. Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow, 133.

74. Anderson, ‘The Natures of Culture’, 36.

75. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 28–30, and 34. After the emancipation of the slaves, the British perception of the island was of a squalid and ruined place. Thompson writes: ‘Some of the roots and routes of still-enduring touristic images of Jamaica (and other parts of the Caribbean) as untouched natural landscapes, populated by coconut and banana trees and contented black “natives”, all clothed in Edenic tropical luxuriance, can be traced to these New Jamaica campaigns’.

76. Ibid, 107–10 and 141.

77. The Dufaycolor Book, published in several editions between 1935 and the 1950s, includes portraits of white women (and a horse), an advertising image for toothpaste, and on the back cover, a picture of a British country house.

78. Brown, ‘Colouring the Nation’141.

79. ‘This Year of Jubilee’, 3.

80. Brown, ‘Colouring the Nation’, 142 and 146.

81. Various editions of The Dufaycolor Book include a section on photographing neon lights. Artificial silk (rayon) clothing as a subject for photography is mentioned in Saunders, ‘Dufaycolor Photography for the Amateur Worker’.

82. Street and Yumibe, ‘The Temporalities of Intermediality’, 141 and 148. Elsewhere, Street writes about the extension of Natalie Kalmus’s role as colour adviser for Technicolor film in Britain into a wider role as a public advocate for colour in dress and décor. Street, Negotiating the Archives 11–12.

83. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 55. In the National Science and Media Museum archive in Bradford examples of Dufaycolor photographs from the 1930s to 1950s depict beach scenes, and flowering gardens, including Kew Gardens. See the Dufaycolor research folders and PA Box 371.

84. Armstrong, ‘Kew Gardens in Colour’, 627.

85. Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur’, 247.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/R014639/1].

Notes on contributors

Michelle Henning

Michelle Henning is Professor in Photography and Media at the University of Liverpool, UK. She is the author of Photography: The Unfettered Image (Routledge 2018). In 2018–19 she was an AHRC leadership fellow, for a project titled ‘Aesthetics, Industry and Innovation: The Ilford Archive’, in which she researched the various archives of the British photography company Ilford Limited. She is currently writing a book using this archival material to address questions of technical, social and environmental change in relation to photographic innovations in Britain during the 1920s and ‘30s.