Autochrome Dreams

By: John Dorfman

December 2007

This past spring, the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, announced that it had acquired two rare color photographs from 1908. They were donated by a 96-year-old woman living in Rochester, and the museum assumed that they had been taken by her mother, Charlotte Spaulding, a member of the Photo-Secession movement who gave up practicing her art after she married into the family that helped found the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo. But it soon became apparent that the images were not by Spaulding, but of her, and had been taken by none other than Edward Steichen, one of the key figures of modernist photography in America and an artist whose reputation and market value have recently surged.

Not only that, but by coincidence the gift came during the same year that marks the centenary of Autochrome, the pioneering color process by which these pictures were made, introduced in France in 1907 by the Lumière Brothers. During this year and into 2008, several museums around the world, including the Eastman House and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, are celebrating this rather unique medium with special exhibitions.

Looking at an Autochrome for the first time is a revelation, in more ways than one. First off, we’re not accustomed to seeing any images from the turn of the century in color, and a well-made and well-preserved Autochrome inspires most people to say, or at least think, "But I thought the world was all black and white back then!" It is a strange and exciting sensation to see scenes and people from a century ago in full, vibrant color.

Second, Autochromes are transparencies on glass, so they need to be illuminated from behind to be seen. Eastman House director Anthony Bannon, who acquired the two Steichens, says, "Sure, it’s difficult to see, but that makes it all the more magical when you hold it up to a light source. In your hand, it’s dark; then, when it intercepts light, this little jewel-like creature comes to life."

Most photography enthusiasts have only seen Autochromes in books, but such reproductions do scant justice to the luminescent richness and shimmering quality of the objects themselves. The colors of Autochrome are often described as "muted," and even if intended as a compliment, the remark is inaccurate. The colors only look muted on paper, or if they have faded due to improper conservation.

Even if you go to an Autochrome exhibition, you’re probably not seeing the real thing. Conservators are loath to let too much light pass through the plates, because that can degrade them over time, so they substitute specially made glass replicas, according to Alison Nordström, curator of photographs at Eastman House.

One of the few exhibitions to present real, original Autochromes was held recently at the gallery of Hans P. Kraus Jr., the New York photography dealer who specializes in 19th- and early 20th-century works. Kraus even presented some of the pictures in Diascopes, period viewing devices consisting of a folding leather case with a mirror inside to reflect light into the plate and the image back to the eye. Visitors could truly experience the pictures as they were when they were created 75 to 100 years ago.

Autochrome has the distinction of being the first commercially viable color process in the history of photography. In 1839, when photography was invented, the lack of color was a distinct disappointment to most people, despite the later artistic prejudice in favor of monochrome. Immediately, inventive minds began to try to solve the problem, with little real success; the most popular alternative being the delicate hand-coloring of black and white pictures after the fact. In 1903, the clever Lumières, Louis and Auguste, already famous for their invention of motion pictures, came up with a genuine and fairly easy-to-use color process, which they perfected over the next four years before offering it to the public at a fanfare-filled event in Paris.So how did it work? Essentially, an Autochrome plate is a thin piece of glass—available sizes ranged from about 6 by 8 inches on down, and the plates could be used in any of a wide variety of cameras—coated with a light-sensitive silver-gelatin emulsion and a thin layer of thousands of potato-starch grains, each dyed one of three colors: green, blue or red. The tiny grains were evenly mixed over the surface and compressed, forming a color screen much like those on a TV tube or a computer monitor—"primitive pixels," in the words of a French customer of Kraus’s. The grains acted as filters, and when light passed through them on its way to the emulsion at the time of exposure, its intensity at each point was modulated by the grains, so that blue grains would transmit more blue light and less red, and so forth. After the emulsion was developed to a negative, it was then chemically reversed into a positive. The image itself was black and white, but the starch-grain filter layer was still intact, so seen through that layer, the image appears in accurate color. When the development was done, a second glass plate was placed over the emulsion and the edges sealed with a special black tape. Since the filter layer is necessary both for taking and for viewing the picture, each Autochrome—unlike, say, a negative from which multiple prints can be made—is a unique object, which naturally increases its appeal to collectors.

As soon as it was introduced, Autochrome "took the world by storm," says Kraus. "Within the first year all the major photographers were using it." Walker Evans famously said, "Color is vulgar," speaking for a large contingent of artistically serious photographers, but there were no such scruples in 1907 as the leaders of the avant-garde Photo-Secession—Alfred Stieglitz, Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn—as well as European Pictorialists like Heinrich Kühn, took to it with vigor.

The interest quickly reached the level of a craze. Coburn took moody photographs of the London docks on Autochrome plates, and created a color portrait of Mark Twain reclining, as was his wont, in bed. Steichen’s portraits of Spaulding, who was beautiful as well as talented, clearly show his joy in exploiting the chromatic possibilities of the new invention, and he also turned his lens on flowers, nudes and landscapes.

"Steichen brought the process over to the U.S. the year the Lumière boys brought it out," and he even planned to write an instruction book on it, Bannon explains. Steiglitz held several Autochrome exhibitions at his gallery "291."

But by around 1914, these heavy hitters of American photography had moved on to other things, which makes their Autochromes particularly rare. Why did their enthusiasm wane so quickly? Pamela Roberts, a former curator at the Royal Photographic Society in London and author of the recently published book A Century of Colour Photography thinks this was because Autochromes are difficult to exhibit. "Projected with a back light, it turns into a lecture or audience experience, which is not what the Secessionist people were after. They wanted photography as a fine art," she notes.

They also may have become frustrated with the technical limitations: Autochrome plates required very long exposures that made capturing movement nearly impossible, plus there was little opportunity for tweaking the image’s development in the darkroom. Furthermore, with a black-and-white negative one could make a variety of different kinds of prints, from the regular gelatin-silver to more exotic types like platinum and gum bichromate. (Steichen’s 1904 landscape "The Pond–Moonlight," which sold for a $2.9 million, the record for any photograph, at Sotheby’s New York in February 2006, has been mistakenly described as an Autochrome. The piece is actually a multiple-layer gum bichromate print.)

Despite the defection of some, Autochrome remained immensely popular, especially in its native France, until it was discontinued in 1932. Some of the best practitioners were not self-conscious artists but documentarians and magazine photographers, and as Kraus points out, the vast majority of Autochromes that come on the market were taken by nameless amateurs who shot them on weekends or on their vacations. (They were generally wealthy and technically skilled, since Autochrome plates were expensive and had to be processed by the photographer.) Many had an excellent eye, and their humbly conceived works are now eagerly sought by collectors.

One of the most assiduous of these—and probably the foremost collector of Autochromes in the U.S.—is Madison, Wisconsin–based Mark Jacobs. "We’re a small but intense group," he says.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."