James Clerk Maxwell
156 years ago, in 1861, Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell presented the world with the first ever colour photograph. Standing in the slipstream of the Scottish Enlightenment, Maxwell demonstrated the revolutionary theory that the human eye could interpret a composite image in full colour when captured with red, blue and green filters. The three photographic monochrome plates and their accompanying filters are now kept in a small museum at 14 India Street, Edinburgh, the house of Maxwell’s birth. The extent to which our contemporary visual culture rests on these three glass plates and Maxwell’s pioneering ideas is immeasurable. Put simply, Maxwell developed a theory that has gone on to underpin the transformative photographic techniques that have, in turn, paved the way for the creation of mobile phones, computer screens and televisions. Yet, astonishingly, this legacy bequeathed by Maxwell has gone largely unrecognized. To be sure, his contributions to electromagnetism and statistical mechanics are lasting and famous, and he is often referred to as one of the world’s greatest physicists. Curiously, however, his interest in optics and the perception of colour is hugely undervalued, even in Scotland. This is a project set to revisit the techniques pioneered by Maxwell and it proposes to do so in a unique, contemporary, international and inter-cultural way.
