Roberts, who has been hunting down collectors for years in pursuit of rare images for her research, agrees: "They are gripped by a passion and spend money they haven’t got." Jacobs recalls, "I started collecting earlier than most of them, around 1972 or ’73. I sold all my paper photographs and bought Autochromes with the money." Today he estimates he has between 3,000 and 4,000 of them, most by amateurs and professional photojournalists. He says, "In many cases the amateurs were far superior to the Stieglitzes and Steichens," which he attributes to the fact that they stuck with it far longer.

Among Jacobs’s favorites are Fred Payne Clatworthy, who shot for National Geographic; the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud, who was a close friend of the Lumières and documented World War I among many other things; Marcel Meys, known for nudes; and Helen Messinger Murdoch, a Bostonian who traveled around the world alone in 1913–15, her camera loaded with Autochrome. Some of her pictures were published in National Geographic.

Jacobs is quite adamant that Autochromes should be appreciated for their unique qualities and revolutionary nature, and resents the frequent comparisons with schools of painting such as the Divisionism or pointillism of Seurat and Signac. "The tendency to equate Autochrome with pointillism comes from reproductions, not from Autochromes themselves," he points out, adding that the multicolored grainy effect in some published versions comes from blowing the images up too big. (According to Roberts, underexposure is another cause of the pointillist effect.)

Jacobs allows that some Autochrome photographers, especially those working in France, were influenced by Impressionism. Nordström agrees: "Autochromes have a depth of three-dimensionality that other color processes don’t have. They look like Impressionist paintings, which is a result of the technical process, but it’s why artists like Kühn embraced it."

While Autochromes are being appreciated anew, prices are still fairly reasonable. Kraus says the majority of collectible Autochromes sell for $2,000 to $5,000, and there are plenty of amateur snapshot types available for a couple of hundred dollars or so—or even $10 or $20 on eBay if you are lucky. A beautiful work by one of the top masters would run from around $30,000 to $50,000.

The pursuit of Autochromes is definitely not for the conventionally minded. "They’re an unknown quantity," says Jacobs. "There’s not a lot of information. You discover it for yourself. You have to get into a mindset; you can’t hang it on the wall. You have to get past that and get past the group mentality of, ‘Oh, this guy’s got a Man Ray…’" For the adventurous photography collector, this intriguing color process from another era could be the next frontier. "The categories haven’t been determined," says Jacobs. "You’re the one to determine their artistic legacy."