Ives, Frederic Eugene

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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b. 17 February 1856 Litchfield, Connecticut, USA

d. 27 May 1937 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

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American printer who pioneered the development of photomechanical and colour photographic processes.

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Ives trained as a printer in Ithaca, New York, and became official photographer at Cornell University at the age of 18. His research into photomechanical processes led in 1886 to methods of making halftone reproduction of photographs using crossline screens. In 1881 he was the first to make a three-colour print from relief halftone blocks. He made significant contributions to the early development of colour photography, and from 1888 he published and marketed a number of systems for the production of additive colour photographs. He designed a beam-splitting camera in which a single lens exposed three negatives through red, green and blue filters. Black and white transparencies from these negatives were viewed in a device fitted with internal reflectors and filters, which combined the three colour separations into one full-colour image. This device was marketed in 1895 under the name Kromskop; sets of Kromograms were available commercially, and special cameras, or adaptors for conventional cameras, were available for photographers who wished to take their own colour pictures. A Lantern Kromskop was available for the projection of Kromskop pictures. Ives's system enjoyed a few years of commercial success before simpler methods of making colour photographs rendered it obsolete. Ives continued research into colour photography; his later achievements included the design, in 1915, of the Hicro process, in which a simple camera produced sets of separation negatives that could be printed as dyed transparencies in complementary colours and assembled in register on paper to produce colour prints. Later, in 1932, he introduced Polychrome, a simpler, two-colour process in which a bipack of two thin negative plates or films could be exposed in conventional cameras. Ives's interest extended into other fields, notably stereoscopy. He developed a successful parallax stereogram process in 1903, in which a three-dimensional image could be seen directly, without the use of viewing devices. In his lifetime he received many honours, and was a recipient of the Royal Photographic Society's Progress Medal in 1903 for his work in colour photography.

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Further Reading

B.Coe, 1978, Colour Photography: The First Hundred Years, London J.S.Friedman, 1944, History of Colour Photography, Boston. G.Koshofer, 1981, Farbfotografie, Vol. I, Munich.

E.J.Wall, 1925, The History of Three-Colour Photography, Boston.

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