ABSTRACT
Hand-coloring does not feature extensively in studies of color photography which tend to be driven by the evolution of technological processes. Instead, coloring, or tinting, photographs by hand is often separated from discussions of photographic processes, designated, in its best examples, as a minor art form. One reason for a tendency to separate hand-coloring from accounts of color photography is that by the 1850s, coloring photographs had become very much the work of women and associated with a degree of vulgarity. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with a shift from analogue to digital technologies, color photography remains in the cultural domain of the vernacular. Black and white, by comparison, still occupies the realm of “art” photography. Yet, from the 1970s, some “fine art” photographers began to embrace polychrome; they questioned the relative associations of monochromatic photography with “serious,” or professional, uses and color photography with more popular, or amateur, ones.
