Foto Berwarna Karo Siadi (1930)

Bila selama ini kita selalu menemukan foto-foto hitam putih akan keberadaan masa lalu masyarakat Karo, maka kali ini dapat dilihat dalam foto-foto yang berwarna. Tehnik untuk menghasilkan foto berwarna awalnya dikenal dengan sebutan Autochrome process. Dan teknik ini telah ditemukan sejak tahun 1907 walau dengan biaya mahal dan warna belum begitu sempurna.

Dalam majalah National Geographic Febuari 1930, ditemukan foto-foto berwarna masyarakat Karo yang dihasilkan dengan memakai lensa positif Autochrome oleh W. Robert Moore. Berikut foto-foto dan keterangannya :

A young Karo woman sits on a rock, dressed in traditional clothing.

Location:              Sumatra, Indonesia.

Photographer:  W. ROBERT MOORE/National Geographic Stock

Dignity distinguishes the Karo Girl.
This young woman has a clear complexion, large brown eyes, and regular features, but her mouth has been marred by the chipping or filing of her teeth to the level of her gums. She wears a costume of homespun, with a huge silver earring held in place by a point of her padded cap.

Karo Ruler of Malayan Stock, Poses Holding a Wooden Tool 
by W. Robert Moore

The chief's people were once ferocious.
Some of the older men in the jolly old Karo ruler's village near Toba Lake remember days of savagery, but now they are peaceful. Though taller, darker and more bearded than the true Malay, they are of Malayan stock, have straight hair, and show no trace of Negrito blood.

Karo women and children pose in indigo-dyed clothing.

Location:              Sumatra, Indonesia.

Photographer:  W. ROBERT MOORE/National Geographic Stock

Karo housewives are proud and independent.
The women share in the profits as well as the labor farms. They make their clothing mostly of indigo-dyed homespun and for jewelry wear huge coiled-silver earrings attached for support to the pillowlike headdresses.

This Area of the Batak Village Is Used for Native Trials and Meetings 
by W. Robert Moore 

Each Karo Village has its court and market square.

The structure in the foreground is used for native trials and public meetings, and on trading days barter goes on around it. In the gables are intricately woven designs of bamboo. The horned heads decorating the roofs indicate the number of animal slaughtered when the building was completed. They recall the ancient legend of the victory of the buffalo, champion of the Sumatrans, over the tiger, chosen fighter of the Javanese, in the battle to settle supremacy between two peoples.

Rice is the staple food of the Bataks.

With long wooden pestles the women pound out the white kernels in primitive mortars 

and gather them in shallow baskets.

(c) National Geographic, February 1930

Catatan tentang Autochrome :

Photographs in Color

Of all the technological innovations occurring in photography between 1870 and 1920, none was more tantalizing or possessed greater potential for commercial exploitation than the discovery of how to make images in color. This search, which had begun with the daguerreotype, entailed much dead-end experimentation before a practicable it temporary solution was found in the positive glass Autochrome plate, marketed in 1907 by its inventors the Lumiere brothers (pi. no. 325) (see A Short Technical History, Part II). Though easy to use, the process required long exposures, was expensive, and though the colors were subtle they were not faultless. Because a simple, efficient method of turning the transparencies into satisfactory photographic color prints was not available, the images had to be viewed in a diascopc (single) or stereograph viewer; as late as the 1920s commercial portraitists still were being advised to send black and white work out to be hand -painted when a color image was desired. Nevertheless, Autochrome from the start attracted amateurs with leisure and money, photographers of flowers and nature, and in the United States, especially, indhiduals and studios involved in producing commercial images for publication. It also appealed briefly to aesthetic photographers who recognized at the time that rather than augmenting reality, color was best treated as another facet of artistic expressiveness (see Chapter 7).

  

French "autochromistes" followed the example of the Lumieres (pi. nos. 342 and 343) in documenting family activities at home, at play, and in their professions. Among professionals, Jules Gervais-Courtellemont photographed in the Near and Far East (pi. no. 344) and documented aspects of World War II; views of military life (pi no. 345) by Jean Tournassoud (later director of photography for the French Army) are other examples of interest in this theme. Autochrome appealed to Lartigue; convinced that "life and color cannot be separated from each other," he took elegant if somewhat mannered snapshots exemplified by Bibi in Nice (pi. no. 351), and for a brief while this color process was used in a similar fashion throughout Europe.

Not surprisingly, amateurs who liked to photograph flowers were delighted by Autochrome, but it also attracted a serious nature photographer, Henry Irving, who was quick to recognize the value of even a flawed system for botanical studies (pi. no. 348). While employed less frequently by documentary photographers, Autochrome was used by William Rau, the Philadelphia commercial photographer of railroad images who by the turn of the century had become interested in artistic camera expression; Produce (pi. no. 347) is an example of a subject and treatment unusual in the color work of the time.

While Autochrome (and its commercial variants) was based on the theory of adding primary colors together on one plate to effect the full range of spectral hues, experithat used a prism to bring the three color plates into one sharply focused image. Because of the cumbersomencss of tripling the exposure, the subjects, taken throughout Rus¬sia, had to be more or less immobile, but despite the technical and logistical difficulties of this complicated undertaking, Prokudin-Gorskii produced what surely must be the most ambitious color documentation of the time. In its early stages, it was hoped that color would add an element of naturalness to the image—the missing ingredient in verisimilitude—since actuality obviously was many-hued rather dian monochromatic as shown in photographs. However, as photographers began to work with the materials they realized that rather than making camera images more real, color dyes comprised another elementments that led to the production of three different color negatives that subsequently were superimposed and either projected or made into color prints were also in progress (see A Short Technical History, Part II). Around 1904, this procedure was used for an extensive documentation of Russian life conceived by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, a well-educated member of the Russian Imperial Technological Society. An educational and ethnographic project made with the tsar's patronage, it involved the production of three color-separation negatives on each plate by using a camera with a spring-operated mechanism that changed filters and repeated the exposures three times. After development, these were projected in an apparatus that had to be considered in terms of its expressive potential. The recognition that the seductiveness of color— its capacity to make ordinary objects singularly attractive— would have a powerful effect on the fields of advertising and publicity was the paramount stimulus in efforts that led to another breakthrough in color technology in the 1930s.

sumber dan contoh foto-foto berwarna yang dihasilkan di tahun di atas 1907 dapat dilihat di sini.