A Brief History of the Autochrome.

Autochrome was developed in Lyon by Auguste and Louis Lumière, patented in 1903–1904 and commercially introduced in 1907. It was the first colour photographic process manufactured and used internationally on a large scale. Each glass plate contained a microscopic screen of potato-starch grains dyed orange-red, green and blue-violet, with carbon black filling the spaces between them, beneath a panchromatic silver-gelatin emulsion. The plate was exposed through the glass so light passed through this colour mosaic before reaching the emulsion. Reversal processing produced a positive colour transparency that was viewed by transmitted light or projected. Because the starch screen absorbed much of the available light, Autochrome was substantially slower than contemporary black-and-white photography and frequently required a tripod and comparatively long exposures.

The process was adopted by professional, amateur and Pictorialist photographers soon after its introduction. Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen were early American users, with Steichen producing Autochrome portraits and figure studies from 1907. Baron Adolph de Meyer and Alvin Langdon Coburn also experimented with the process, while Ellis Kelsey became an early British practitioner and exhibitor. Olive Edis used Autochrome extensively for portraiture from about 1912 and designed her own viewing device, the Edis Diascope. In the United States, Samuel Gottscho and Charles C. Zolle worked with the process, while National Geographic developed a collection of almost 15,000 Autochrome plates. Its photographers included Jacob J. Gayer, who used colour to document American landscapes, communities, industry and everyday life during the 1920s.

Autochrome also became an important documentary process in France. Jules Gervais-Courtellemont used it extensively for geographical and cultural photography and influenced Albert Kahn's adoption of colour for his Archives de la Planète, begun in 1909. Kahn's photographers included Léon Busy, Georges Chevalier and Roger Dumas, while Frédéric Roman was among photographers associated with the wider French Autochrome record. During the First World War Paul Castelnau and Fernand Cuville worked for the French Army's Section Photographique de l'Armée, producing colour records of soldiers, military positions, civilians and war-damaged towns from 1917. Autochrome remained widely used through the 1910s and 1920s, but its glass support, slow exposure and requirement for transmitted-light viewing became disadvantages as colour film developed. Lumière production of glass Autochrome plates ended in the early 1930s, followed by flexible colour materials and newer processes including Kodachrome, introduced in 1935.

Autochrome

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Historical Autochrome photographs, early 20th century.
Photographers include Paul Castelnau, Fernand Cuville, Léon Busy, Georges Chevalier, Roger Dumas and other Autochrome photographers.
Source: Wikimedia Commons and contributing archive collections.
Licence: Public Domain where indicated on the individual image record.

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