Mama Don't Take My Autochrome

Sorry for the earworm; I’m just passing it along, as I can’t discuss the story of the world’s first successful color photography without Paul Simon intruding on the soundtrack.  Putting that aside for now, let’s talk about the Lumiére brothers, August and Louis, who were deeply involved in the business of photography, and patented many processes and techniques that advanced the science of still and motion pictures.  For example, they patented the film perforations used forever after on roll film and cinematic film, and patented a cine camera in 1895 that could record, develop, and project motion pictures.

The Lumiéres did not invent the cinema camera or the concept of the ‘movie’, as various forms of moving images had been around for decades, including the Zoetrope and other stop-motion optical devices.  But a photographic movie was novel, and while they weren’t the first to make a motion picture, the Lumiére brothers were the first to project a film at a public screening, on March 22 1895, in Paris.   The screening was part of a conference put on by the brothers to show their developments in photography, and progress towards color photography, and it’s said they were surprised that the audience was far more interested in the movies than in their lectures.  That fascination lingers to this day, but the Lumiéres couldn’t understand it, and considered movies “the an invention without any future”.  They refused to sell their cinematic equipment to aspiring filmmakers like Georges Méliès, and by 1903 had abandoned their cinematic research to focus on color photography, their true interest.  The brothers worked with early forms of color photography like interference heliography (the ‘Lippman process‘) and a subtractive gum bichromate process they demonstrated at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900.

In 1903 they patented a new process that specified very fine, transparent potato starch dyed different colors (orange/green/violet), mixed in a gelatin emulsion for an even distribution of the colored grains, and laid on glass with lampblack (carbon) filling the gaps between the grains, using pressure to ensure a only single layer of grains were used: this layer was then covered in shellac, and a panchromatic silver halide layer added, which was the light-sensitive material that would ultimately fix the image [the full process is described below]. They dubbed the process Autochrome.  The process launched commercially in 1907: the four-year gap between the patent and actual production was necessary to invent(!) the industrial machinery necessary to produce sensitized glass plates on a large scale. The Autochrome was the first successful, commercially-produced color photography system.

Color ‘film’ as we know it would not be introduced until the mid-1930s, so for 25 years or so, the Autochrome was the principal color photo process used by professional and amateur photographers.  Most notable among the pros was Jacque-Henri Lartigue, whose photos of his wife Bibi exploit the dreamy, pointillist quality of the Autochrome to reflect his loving gaze.  Not everyone loved that hazy quality, though, and the search was on for a crisper technique, which was eventually developed using multiple layers of colored dye on film, which had a much, much finer grain that was nearly invisible to the human eye.

But many artists and photographers embraced the ‘limitations’ of the Autochrome as its principal charm: after all, Monet had painted the last of his ‘Water Lillies’ series in 1899, only 8 years before Autochrome was commercially produced, and George Seurat’s distinctive Pointillist style used that same dreamy quality, which suited the artistic tendencies of the era perfectly.  When applied to an image of an airplane, a car, or a motorcycle, the Autochrome became more of a work of art, contradicting the popular narrative that photographs were ‘documentary’ and captured some kind of truth in the world, to the extent of being used as evidence in court proceedings.  But all photographs must be taken with a grain of salt, as artists were the most famous early adopters of the photographic process, and understood it as a medium for expression, if a photo was to be considered successful.   Even ‘documentarians’ like Matthew Brady, when capturing the after-effects of Civil War battles, dragged cannonballs and corpses around to create a better composition.

The Autochrome process was thought lost for decades, as the technical details and machinery required to produce the plates (and later film versions of the medium, produced until the mid-1950s) were long gone by the 21st Century.  A revised version of the process was recently developed by the Penumbra Foundation in NYC, and the patent process is underway for possible small-batch production or even large-batch, if a reborn company like Polaroid wants to branch out into new/old territories.  I’d certainly like to try it!

The Autochrome process described:

Source potato starch grains measuring between 0,006-0,025mm: dye three batches, respectively in violet, green and orange, using water-based dyes.  Mix the grains thoroughly.  On a glass plate (0.9 – 1.8mm thick – ‘single strength’ glass), lay a thin gelatin or water-based varnish layer, and blow or dust the still-sticky layer with the dyes starch grains: blow or dust off the surplus grains.  Add a layer of very fine lampblack (carbon) over the top, to fill in the gaps between the colored grains.  Use pressure to ensure the resulting layer is only one grain thick.  Apply clear varnish to seal and make waterproof.  In a darkroom, add a layer of panchromatic emulsion.  If you’ve made a large sheet of glass (the typical production method), cut plates to the desired size (eg, 4×5″ et al).  Store the plates in a light-tight container for future use in a plate camera.