Lausanne museum unveils the secrets of the first color photographs

An exhibition on Gabriel Lippmann, the inventor of one of the first methods for color photography, opens today at the Photo Elysée museum in Lausanne and will run until 21 May. The exhibition provides a unique glimpse into Lippmann's multispectral imaging technique - for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize - by presenting his original color plates in an entirely novel way, thanks to a joint project with EPFL. Gabriel Lippmann: Color Photography , opening today in Lausanne, is the culmination of years of collaborative work. It highlights images from the museum's Gabriel Lippmann collection: 137 of the approximately 250 plates currently in existence worldwide. In designing the exhibition, Photo Elysée worked closely with researchers at LCAV, within EPFL's School of Computer & Communication Sciences, to come up with an effective method for displaying the plates and the color reproduction technique that earned Lippmann the 1908 Nobel Prize in physics. The collaboration - which took place in three phases over several years - involved exploring the mechanisms of multispectral imaging. "First, the researchers helped us better understand Lippmann's imaging process," says Pauline Martin, the exhibition curator.