Levi Hill
American photographer (1816-1865) · United States · On the map · Artists · Died at 48
Levi Hill was an American minister in upstate New York who claimed in 1851 that he had invented a color photographic process.
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A typical day, 30 days to 10 August 2026
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About this person
Borrowing terms previously introduced in France, Hill called his process "heliochromy" and the photographs that it produced "heliochromes", but by analogy to the naming of the then-current daguerreotype process after its inventor Louis Daguerre, Hill's color photographs were soon being called "Hillotypes". Hill's work was met with skepticism during his lifetime, then for more than a hundred years after his death histories of photography routinely dismissed it as a complete fraud. Later researchers found that his very difficult process did in fact have a limited ability to reproduce the colors of nature.
