"Colors the Way They're Supposed to Be – Every Time"

Talisa Lallai subtly calibrates the use of color in her work. She takes pictures on color negative film and makes movies on Super 8 film, which she then scans and prints, projects, or displays on monitors. What she values about the materials of analog photography and film is their distinctive color quality and grain. These possess a certain nostalgia that combines productively with her artistic investigation of an undefined longing for the exotic. She also uses found visual materials, historic imagery that not only expands the spectrum of concepts and motifs but also introduces a different materiality into the work. In this artists’ book, Post Tropical, she has placed her own pictures alongside found advertisements for the first time. Touting the color fidelity of Agfa-Gevaert slide film, these ads are also an explicit reference to the thinking about color in photography that makes up such an important theme in Lallai’s oeuvre.

The ads were taken from the German travel magazine Merian – specifically, from the July 1978 issue (on Crete) and the June 1982 issue (on Turin, Piedmont, and the Aosta Valley). In them, Agfa-Gevaert promises that its slide film is “true in color down to the finest nuances” and “beautiful as nature.” That sounds quite promising. As is typical in advertising, the significance of photographic color is presented in a thoroughly one-sided way and linked, naturally, to a positive claim about a particular product. In the context of Post Tropical, these ads provide an occasion to delve more deeply into color as an aspect of photographic art. They invite us to ask what information can be read from the chromatic characteristics of photographs, what technical possibilities and preferences they embody, and how both the actual colors in the image and our perceptions of photographic color may change.

In the discourse of the history of art and photography, the interrelationship between a picture’s color and its meaning tends not to receive much attention.² A rare exception is New Color Photography, an American movement from the 1960s whose very name pays tribute to color as a form of photographic expression.³ William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, and others in their orbit used color as an artistic medium for the communication of their pictorial ideas, refuting the prevailing opinion that color photography was too amateurish and commercial to hold its own in the discourse of art. In photographic restoration, sensitivity to the reproduction of color, especially in terms of its (in)stability, has been growing for years. Discussions with artists sometimes spark debates over whether new prints should be color-corrected using the enhanced capabilities of contemporary technology, rather than reproducing the look of the original.⁴ By now, certainly, it is clear how strongly color characteristics determine the message conveyed by works of art, and how quickly those characteristics can shift.

Ever since the invention of photography, color has been an important aspect of the technological development of the medium. In the mid-nineteenth century, the consistent translation of color into shades of gray was one of the biggest challenges, since early light-sensitive materials tended to shift colors’ luminance values.⁵ In addition, the photographic processes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought with them their own tonalities. Daguerreotypes looked bluish-gray, and calotypes had a reddish-brown cast, while a yellowish tint was typical of albumen prints. Presumably, photographers did not regard these chromatic characteristics in purely functional terms; rather, the diversity of early photographic techniques enabled them to work creatively with color. By the turn of the twentieth century, art photographers were experimenting with color processes such as gum printing and autochrome, thereby guiding technological development in the direction of their own artistic interest. Throughout the early 1900s, before color photography’s arrival at a stable and workable state around mid-century, the increasingly standardized gelatin silver process aspired to a neutral black and white. Depending on the chemicals and paper used, however, the prints tended to be either cold (bluish) or warm (yellowish) in tone. With digitization, we have become accustomed to the clear, vibrant colors of digital photography, which allows us to select the desired color temperature by setting the white balance before shooting, either manually or using a preset. From the perspective of analog photography, the coloration of digital pictures often looks artificial. Conversely, from the perspective of the digital, analog pictures look strangely distanced from reality, both spatially and temporally, by comparison.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the two Agfa ads were published in Merian, color photography was thoroughly established among hobbyist photographers, at least in Western Europe and the United States. An alternative to color negative film was slide film, which made it possible to create good color images cheaply and easily. Slide film had first appeared on the market as “color reversal film” about forty years earlier. In the mid-1930s, Kodak and Agfa both introduced slide film brands – Kodachrome and Agfacolor – at roughly the same time.⁶ Photography enjoyed renewed popularity as a hobby during the postwar years, and home slideshows flourished. The film featured in the two advertisements, Agfachrome CT18, was the most popular film for amateur photography in Germany after Kodachrome. A third market leader arrived in 1981 with the introduction of Fujichrome, from the Japanese company Fuji. Today, even after the discontinuation and partial revival of the production of slide film⁷ and the general decline in its use, photographers still talk about differences in color reproduction between Kodak, Agfa, and Fuji.⁸ While Kodachrome stands for warm colors, Fuji and Agfa are mainly known for their balanced greens and blues and their beautiful skin tones, respectively. All slide film types have higher contrast and more brilliant colors than color negative film. This is because slide film is made up of multiple layers that either contain dye couplers or receive them after the film is exposed. Slide film is also physically significantly denser than color negative film, so that even the darkest and lightest parts of the image remain vibrant and detailed when projected. The advertisements for Agfachrome CT18 use colorful wildlife photography to illustrate the film’s quality. The ad from 1982 features two parrots, whose “gloriously colorful heads” and “vivid red” bills look “simply fantastic” on Agfa film. Anyone can take pictures with Agfachrome, because it produces “colors the way they’re supposed to be – every time.”

Today, in 2024, some forty years after that ad was published, Agfa’s assurance most likely applies only to the images printed in Merian. The colors in the transparencies that were taken back then probably don’t look the way they’re supposed to look anymore – at least not according to the manufacturer’s specifications. As a photochemical material, slide film is subject to a variable aging process. Slides take on a reddish or bluish cast, depending on the brand, and can fade due to frequent projection or poor storage practices, rendering them useless in terms of faithful color reproduction. Which is where Talisa Lallai comes in. In this book, alongside magazine ads and her own photographs, she also presents old slides depicting images from South America. Instead of color-correcting them to be more neutral or uniform, which could be done relatively easily in the digitization process, she leaves the images tinted. For Lallai, the “wrong” colors are exactly right, because they open up a space for visual reflection. Compared to the new photographs recently taken by the artist, the temporal distance of the found images becomes abundantly clear. At the same time, Lallai’s compilation of pictures also manifests an expanded conception of the medium: A photograph is never just an image that preserves a moment in the past. The photographic body, its specific materiality and transformation, also stores the the time that has passed since the shutter was released, upon which we gaze from the present. In the context of this book, this realization underscores the fact that, just as contemporary color conventions in photography are based on those of the past, whether they distance themselves from them or embrace them, the images of the tropical in these pages provide a resonant space within which to investigate the post-tropical.