Experimentation with color

226 Experimentation with color

During the 1950s, work with color photography among the members of the FCCB was basically producing transparencies upon which the original colors and forms of the photographed subject were recorded. The aesthetic effects of these images depended on the conditions of the ambient light available at the moment the photo was being taken and of the photographer's ability to harmonize the colors in the frame through the angle of view that was adequate to his sensibility and desired composition.

Surpassing these limitations meant experimenting with color as photographers had done with black and white, since the dawn of photography, particularly after the emergence of the modern movement at the beginning of the XX century. Techniques as the photogram, solarization process, separation of tones, and others were created and expanded in black and white photography.

Herros Cappello (1914–99), an ophthalmologist and amateur photographer who joined the FCCB, in 1953, began, around two years later, his personal process of technical color preparation that led him to Germany in order to study it at the Agfa industry. Seeking to obtain transparencies and printing on paper, with total control over the artistic result of the color, Cappello used different techniques based on voluntary light control. One of these was to apply successive masks on a negative or printing paper until transporting the desired colors to a transparency or to the paper copy, according to the areas determined. Another was the use of colored filters and masks when printing negatives in black and white.