The CC logo

OBJECT OF THE MONTH JANUARY 2025

Our object of the month takes us back to 1967, the year F.C. Gundlach founded Creative Colour GmbH (CC for short). It's a color slide that came to our attention during inventory processing and bears the company logo. F.C. Gundlach established the company as the German branch of Creative Colour Limited, which was already successful in London and New York. As the name suggests, the focus was on printing color photographs. Specifically, this involved the production and retouching of C-prints and the legendary dye transfers. These printing processes also explain the logo's color scheme: cyan, magenta, and yellow – the three colors of subtractive color mixing that form the basis for both printing methods.

The C-print consists of three light-sensitive emulsion layers which, after exposure and development, release the dyes of the three primary colors, resulting in the finished color print. Quite simple, really. The dye-transfer process is considerably more complex. First, black-and-white color separation negatives are created using color filters. From these, matrices the size of the desired color print are made and dyed in cyan, magenta, and yellow. In the final step, the matrices are transferred one after the other onto baryta paper. This considerable effort was rewarded with a nuanced and colorfast print. Photographers like Harry Callahan and Irving Penn appreciated the process and produced color portfolios with FC Gundlach in the 1980s. Since Kodak discontinued the Pan Matrix film developed for the process in 1994, only remaining stocks have been used since then.

But montages were also part of CC's portfolio. A good example of this can be found on three other slides we discovered. Here, a photograph of the media bunker was colorized, textured, and combined with the CC initials. Creative Colour GmbH offered such services for exactly twenty years until it was dissolved in 1987. The timing was good, as the early 1990s saw the dawn of the age of digital image processing and printing.