Important Dates in Photography:

1850: Levi Hill claims to invent color photography, though his claims were highly contested

1861: Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell demonstrates a color photography system involving three black and white photographs, each taken through a red, green, or blue filter. The photos were turned into lantern slides and projected in registration with the same color filters. This is the “color separation” method.

1868: Ducas de Hauron publishes a book proposing a variety of methods for color photography.

1877: Louis Ducos du Hauron experiments with subtractive color

1906: Availability of panchromatic black and white film and therefore high quality color separation color photography. J.P. Morgan finances Edward Curtis to document the traditional culture of the North American Indian.

1907: First commercial color film, the Autochrome plates, manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France

1909–1915: Prokudin-Gorskii’s color documentary photography in Russia

1932: Inception of Technicolor for movies, where three black and white negatives were made in the same camera under different filters;

World War II: Development of multi-layer color negative films

1963: First color instant film developed by Polaroid;

1976: First solo show of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, William Eggleston’s Guide

No mention of the history of color photography is complete without including Kodachrome. Paul Simon sang "Mama don't take my Kodachrome away," but sadly she did.