[Bananas]

Explorer, artist, author, and topographer Frederick Dellenbaugh is best known for photographs he made along the Colorado River during John Wesley Powell’s 1871 expedition to the Grand Canyon. In the early twentieth century, Dellenbaugh also experimented with photography’s first commercially successful color process, named autochrome by its French inventors, the Lumière brothers. Autochromes are positive glass transparencies in which the color is derived from an additive process involving thin washes of tinted potato starch. Appropriately enough, Dellenbaugh employed the technique to memorialize another starchy staple, the banana. He photographed these seven specimens soon after the market for bananas exploded in the United States, bolstered by the formation of the United Fruit Company in 1899.