‘Interdisciplinary approaches to Teaching and Curating Colour’ – online seminar April 1

On April 1 2026 Charlotte Ribeyrol will be taking part in the online seminar 'Interdisciplinary approaches to Teaching and Curating Colour' convened by Dr Liz Watkins for the Colour Group (GB). All welcome. Attendance is free but please register on Eventbrite.

This interdisciplinary seminar focuses on the theories and methodologies used by curators, digitisation specialists, archivists and lecturers to initiate discussion and new insights into the history of colour technologies, materials and meanings. Digitised images increasingly form the initial point of access to museum collections, from the archival materials displayed online, (re)circulated via social media, through to the construction of immersive installations and the use of colour and light in architectural design. The effects of digital media are diverse, inciting new possibilities and concerns including the capture of data, its visualisation and its relationship to the social and material histories it represents.

The strategic use of digitisation has informed the analysis, preservation and exhibition of fragile objects and materials that are susceptible to fading (Autochromes, tinted and toned film stock, textiles). Digital technologies offer new perspectives on early film colour and tangible practices (cutting, splicing, the application of dyes by hand) through the magnification of the photographic grain and film formats, displaying materials that are difficult to access, or alternatively, through colourisation techniques that add colours to historic black-and-white photographs.

The seminar explores:

• How have colour materials held in museums and archives been curated for display in the architectural spaces of exhibitions, presented on screens, for printed catalogues and via databases?
• What insights, limitations, failed experiments and their affordances have emerged through the digitisation of photochemical images and other materials in the interests of authentic colours?
• In what way do exhibition techniques alter visitor experiences and spectator perceptions of archives, or the material history of objects, including photographic images and film texts?
• If teaching colour initiates interdisciplinary approaches — connecting diverse theories, practices and workflows across humanities, sciences and technologies — what methods have and might be productive?

SPEAKERS

Professor Charlotte Ribeyrol

Professor of 19th-century British Literature, Sorbonne Université / Honorary Curator, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Presentation: Chromotope: Unveiling the Stories of 19th-Century Colour

This presentation will explore three key outcomes of CHROMOTOPE: The 19th-Century Chromatic Turn (2019–2025), an ERC-funded project examining how colour — and chromatic matter in particular — can be addressed in an exhibition space, an online database, and a lecture room. Over six years, an international team (Sorbonne Université / University of Oxford / Le Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers) investigated how the perception and reception of colour was transformed across 19th-century Europe following the invention of the first coal-tar-based aniline dye in 1856. This multifaceted ‘colour revolution’ made mass-produced and mass-consumed colour a key signifier of the ‘modern’.

The exhibition Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Sept. 2023 – Feb. 2024) sought to dispel this bleak vision through 150 colourful artefacts — from stained glass and ceramics to dyed fabrics and artists’ pigments — and a scenography based on 19th-century visual archives. The open-access ChromoBase, structured around ‘colour narratives’ on 19th-century chromatic materiality and featuring high-resolution details of digitised synthetic dye samples, made the material evidence of the colour revolution freely accessible to researchers and the general public alike.

Charlotte Ribeyrol is Professor of 19th-century British Literature at Sorbonne Université in Paris and honorary curator at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Her main field of research is Victorian Hellenism and the reception of the colours of the past in 19th-century painting and literature. Following her Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford (2016–2018), she was awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for CHROMOTOPE (2019–2025). She co-curated Colour Revolution, Victorian Art, Fashion and Design at the Ashmolean Museum (21 September 2023 – 18 February 2024) and is the author of William Burges’s Great Bookcase and the Victorian Colour Revolution (Yale University Press, 2023).

Professor Joshua Yumibe

Research Foundation Distinguished Professor in Film Studies and English, Michigan State University

Presentation: Exhibiting the Chromatic Image

Amongst colour cinema’s many effects, its powers of enchantment are readily apparent when exhibited, be it in the theatre, gallery, or classroom. This talk focuses on the various fantastical as well as ideological powers of colour, particularly in the context of exhibition. It will be framed through the variety of curatorial and programming work carried out with the chromatic image over the past two decades — from classrooms to gallery spaces, and in collaboration with venues such as the George Eastman Museum, EYE Filmmuseum, and the National Gallery of Art. The intermedial aspects of the programming will be emphasised, from screen to other modes of chromatic expression, as those types of connections have proven fruitful for students and audience members for relating the enchanting worlds of colour cinema to a variety of artistic and cultural spheres of production.

Joshua Yumibe is a Michigan State University Research Foundation Distinguished Professor in Film Studies and English. He is the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (2012) and co-author of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (2015). Most recently he co-authored with Sarah Street Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (2019), which won both the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award and the IAMHIST–Michael Nelson Prize. Street and Yumibe have also recently co-edited Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury (2024). He has curated, programmed, and collaborated on exhibitions and screenings at institutions including the National Gallery of Art, the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, the George Eastman Museum, EYE Filmmuseum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

Dr Dominic Williams

Assistant Professor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Northumbria University

Presentation: Digital Colourisation as Public History: Reflections on Teaching

In this talk we will reflect on our experience of preparing for and teaching a session on digital colourisation for an MA History module on History in the Digital Age. The session focuses on digitally colourised ‘images of violence’, broadly defined, and asks to what extent colourisation can offer reparative interpretations of these images, the subjects that they depict, the technologies used and the institutions that produced them. Case studies include Per Ivar Somby’s colourisation of ethnographic photographs of Sámi people, interpreted as a form of ‘digital visual repatriation’ (Marselis 2024); Hidenori Watanave and Anju Niwata’s project Rebooting Memories, which uses colourised photographs of family life in Hiroshima as a means to allow survivors of the atomic bombing to work through their past; and Marina Amaral’s Faces of Auschwitz project.

Dr Dominic Williams is Assistant Professor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Northumbria University. He has recently published articles and chapters on representations of the Holocaust in heavy metal, the place of victims in Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust, and the location outtakes of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. He is currently co-editing (with Dr Liz Watkins) an article on ‘The Faces of Auschwitz: Digital Colourisation, Ethics and the Archive’ in their co-edited volume Colourised Histories: Reading Digital and Analogue Photographic and Film Archives Now (2025).

Mathilde Renauld

Senior Conservator (Paper and Photographs), Victoria and Albert Museum

Presentation: The Autochrome Layer-by-Layer: Exploring What Materiality Means for Access to Early Colour Images

This presentation will explore the materiality of the Autochrome Lumière, the first commercially successful colour photographic process. Like a lot of early photographic processes, the main support for the image is glass and the image is obtained by exposing a silver gelatin emulsion. Unlike modern colour photographs and film which rely on dyes within a gelatin-based emulsion, the Autochrome relied on a “mosaic” screen of microscopic, dyed potato starch grains acting as colour filters. Exploring autochromes layer by layer will make clear how these materials dictate the viewing experience of autochromes as well as the preservation and conservation needs of these physically and chemically fragile objects. The talk will focus on the specific conservation challenges and address the balancing act between preservation and access.

Mathilde Renauld is Senior Conservator (Paper and Photographs) at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Mathilde specialises in the care and treatment of paper-based and photographic materials. She has worked as a conservator at several institutions including the Wimbledon Tennis Museum, the National Archives, the National Gallery of Ireland, and the Museum of London before joining the V&A. Mathilde holds an MA in Conservation of Fine Art, an MA in Art History, and a HND in Chemistry.

Professor Barbara Flueckiger

Professor Emeritus of Film Studies, University of Zurich & CEO, Scan2Screen

Presentation: Visual and Tactile Approaches to the Presentation and Teaching of Color Film’s Materiality

Only very few people have access to film as a material object. This is even more true for today’s students who grew up with digital images and technology. Considering this lack of first-hand experience, it is pivotal to offer multiple access points to color film’s materiality and material aesthetics. With Bregt Lameris and in collaboration with the Lichtspiel / Kinemathek in Bern, a didactical concept with visual and tactile elements was developed to offer an immediate multi-sensory experience. This concept was further developed through museum exhibitions in close collaboration with curators. Even in the digital domain it is possible to provide a deeper understanding through visual representations of analogue films by producing authentic depictions that include the whole perforation area, photo-micrographs, colorimetric visualizations, and various photographic methods.

Professor Barbara Flueckiger was Professor of Film Studies at the University of Zurich 2007–2023, now Professor Emeritus, and founder and CEO of Scan2Screen. Her projects include the Timeline of Historical Colors in Photography and Film, developed from her research on Film History Re-mastered at Harvard University and through her ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors project. Her work has informed the curation of Color Mania — Materiality of Color in Photography and Film at the Fotomuseum in Winterthur and Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema at the Academy Museum of M