This seems to the only page I saved from a book I found in a salvage shop in California back in the 90s. When I came across it recently, I was kind of floored at how I had managed to forget it. I tracked down the article that it was drawn from, and you can download it here. It’s basically a status report on the pursuit of color photography, delivered by one Sir William Herschel, son of Sir John Herschel, the man who gave photography its name. At the time, some progress had been made on multiple methods of recording a color image, but none of them were fully viable. Herschel waxed poetic in accounting for the many efforts of the photographic innovator, recommending that scientist and artist alike face their frustrated endeavors like “the countless laughter of the ocean, upon which God’s great gift of light dances and entrances us.” So many implications for us over a century later, as our own endeavors are entangled with both the salt of the oceans from which life emerged, and the plastic that we’ve doomed it to host without end.
