The Rise of Color

Lakeside Press Studios. For Michigan Bell Telephone Company
Lakeside Press Studios. Sport.
Lakeside Press Studios. Color advertisement.
Nickolas Muray. Lucky Strike Girl. Photographers strove to make color prints that matched the original transparencies and the objects they depicted as closely as possible. Muray, writes Banta, “was the master of trichrome carbro printing, considered one of the superior color processes of the time and one that became widely used.”

The 1934 Rockefeller Plaza exhibition of advertising and industrial photography consisted mostly of black-and-white images, but did include some color prints, four of them shown here (see “Click and Ka-ching,” July-August, page 84). The High Art of Photographic Advertising, a reprise of the 1934 exhibition, is on view at Baker Library, Harvard Business School, through October 9. In the accompanying catalog, guest curator Melissa Banta explains the challenge of color. 

“Color photography made its appearance in magazine advertising in the 1890s through the process of chromolithography,” Banta writes. “Advances in the technology came in 1910, with the development of two- and three-color printing processes. In general, color printing was more complicated and expensive than black and white, and its results less reliable and ‘realistic.’ Trade journals essentially considered black and white ‘preferable to lurid or unnatural color reproductions.’”

In any case, most products being advertised were not colorful. “When color began to be added to the products themselves,” Banta writes, “advances in color printing and reproduction followed. Starting in the 1920s, American consumers went from a commercial world of white towels and black Model Ts to a range of products with a fantastic palette of hues from which to choose.”

Click here for the July-August 2010 issue table of contents

You might also like

An Original Magna Carta, Hidden in Plain Sight

A rare original surfaces at Harvard at an “almost providential” moment. 

Doctors for Change

Countway Library exhibit explores historic anti-nuclear activism

Rendering Dreams in Art

South Korean artist’s socially themed photographs at the Peabody Essex Museum

Most popular

Rebecca Henderson: Does Capitalism Need to be Reimagined?

How to reform capitalism to confront climate change and extreme inequality, with economist and McArthur University Professor Rebecca Henderson

The New Gender Gaps

What to do as men and boys fall behind

Danielle Allen Debates Far-Right Blogger Curtis Yarvin

Popular monarchist debates Allen on democracy.

Explore More From Current Issue

Chinese Immigrants in Early America

Michael Luo ’98 on the first great wave of immigration—and of nativist anti-immigrant reaction