Color Photos from WW I

During the last few days there was a lot of interest for the beautiful, impressive color photos taken during the 1st World War around 1917, that were shown on bigdandbubba’s site. In the meantime, they seem to have taken the image gallery offline, so I did some research and found the original source of the images: The french Ministry of culture is showing a large collection of photos from that time online. That site is french only, and the images are a little hard to find there, so I set up a little gallery with selected pictures.

These pictures were taken using the so called “Autochrome” process – There is a website dedicated to these type of photos, the Musée Autochrome Lumiére.

The Autochrome was the first viable colour photograph process, and was invented in 1904 by the Lumiére brothers. The Autochrome “screen” was created by forming a layer of minute starch grains dyed in the primary colours (red, blue and green), behind which was a layer of panchromatic film. When the picture was taken these starch grains acted as tiny filters on the film. The film was then subjected to reversal development, and then viewed, as a transparency, through an identical screen. The pictures, though dark by present day standards, were delicate and of a soft pastel nature.