Luc Sante - Colors / Sepia - Cabinet Magazine

Because of this it has become the color of nostalgia. When you visit Tombstone, Arizona, or Leadville, Colorado, you can dress in one of a variety of replica Old West outfits and have your portrait taken in a simulation of a frontier photo studio; the print will be finished in a particularly ruddy shade of sepia. This same shade was until fairly recently employed to reproduce nineteenth-century photographs in books issued by budget coffee-table publishers, such as Bonanza. A volume on the transcontinental railroad, say, or even a collection of pictures by Timothy O’Sullivan, if published in an inexpensive edition before 1990 or so, was sure to feature muddy plates that were presumably thought to gain in atmosphere what they lost in detail. Today you can convert your recent experiences into thrillingly distant memories by digitally turning color photographs a monochromatic sepia through the agency of Photoshop. For added poignancy you can even give a picture an oval mask and fade out the edges. The photos used in demonstrations of the technique always depict momentous occasions with a predetermined nostalgia factor—the arrival of the new baby—although not the ones associated with ends more than beginnings, such as the retirement party or the golden anniversary, for which sepia would introduce an unwelcome reminder of mortality.


Sepia photographs from the past—from the earliest calotypes by Fox Talbot, circa 1840, up to maybe the third decade of the twentieth century—supply a range of emotional effects as broad as their range of variations on sepia. The many fluctuations in the precise tone of sepia sometimes represent aesthetic choices by the photographer or the printer, but more often have to do with a greater or lesser knowledge of chemistry on the part of these practitioners. The more reddish the tone—the greater its resemblance to contemporary mass-market ideas of the color—the more likely it is that it has resulted from deterioration of the print over time. Sepia in its original state can sometimes be misty, but it can also be steely. It can blur the edges of things in a way that mimics the selective softening of memories over a lifetime, but it can also register and enumerate details with fidelity and penetration, to a degree that beside it black-and-white can appear bloodlessly actuarial and polychrome looks gaudy. Sepia was fortuitously equipped to take on the sensuous and very nearly the tactile qualities of much of the matter represented in the photographs of its period: walnut furniture and flocked wallpaper and velvet draperies and brass fittings and bronze statuary—and bricks and stone, of course.