Autochrome
Autochrome is an early colour-photography technology that produced compelling but, until the Internet era, seldomseen images of World War I. Patented in France in 1903 by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, it used glass plates coated with grains of colour-dyed potato starch, along with more standard silverhalide chemistry, to produce a natural colour transparency. Several official war photographers, including Jules Gervais-Courtellemont of France and Hans Hildenbrand on the German side, made use of the nascent technology. Difficult to publish in the day, the photos mostly languished before the era of digital scanning.
Because the plates required long exposure, Autochromes of real-time war are rare. Instead, photographers turned their lenses toward preparations, life in the trenches, and aftermath.
Today, these images offer a vivid glimpse of a war that was not so black and white after all.
To the fear in the eyes of soldiers awaiting action in their trench, to the ironic innocence of toddlers playing with toy warplanes on the streets of Paris, to the heartless reach of destruction and death into Europe’s precious communities, there is an added dimension: “The colours are incredible,” says Frances Gubler, a researcher at the University of Vermont who wrote on Lumière’s U.S. plate-making plant there. The main factory was in Lyon, France.
— Alfred Holden
“The colours are incredible.” FRANCES GUBLER RESEARCHER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT