While preparing Farbe im Photo, one of the first exhibitions in the Germanspeaking world on the history of colour photography in 1981, the curatorial team I was part of – together with Siegfried Gohr, Gert Koshofer, and Klaus op ten Höfel – stumbled upon a small glass plate that looked like a cassette in the possession of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, with the photograph of a stuffed parrot that struck its viewers with a brightness of colours unparalleled to any other specimen in this field (Gohr 1981, 72). We learned that the photograph was made by Richard Neuhauss, a renowned anthropologist and frequent author in photographic magazines at the time, after a photographic process designed by Gabriel Lippmann who had received the Nobel Prize for this invention in 1908, the first in the field of physics with the help of photography (Lippmann 1894). Of course, we traced some material from and about Lippmann in museums worldwide. We reserved for the exhibition a number of colour photographs on paper from several imaging technologies as well as one or the other portrait of the scientist in his lab at the Sorbonne University in Paris (Gohr 1981, 284, 4). Fairly soon, the interest in Lippmann and his process among us diminished into the corner of scientifically interesting but medially – or even artistically – unsatisfying displays.