Autochrome Lumière: When the World First Turned to Colour in the Early 1900s
- dthholland
- May 30
- 8 min read
These days, we don’t give colour photography a second thought. It’s everywhere. From the high-res selfies on your phone to vintage film simulations on Instagram, colour has become so normal, so ever-present, that it’s easy to forget just how long it took for photography to get there, and how mind-blowing those early colour images must have seemed.
Back in the early 20th century, when someone first saw a colour photograph, it wasn’t just impressive, it was magical. The colours weren’t vivid in the way we know them now. They weren’t sharp or ultra-realistic. But they were real enough, soft enough, and dreamy enough to make people stop in their tracks. And leading the way was a clever invention out of France: the Autochrome Lumière.
How It All Started: The Long Road to Colour
Let’s rewind a bit. Before the 1900s, photography meant black and white. Or, more accurately, shades of grey. The silvers, shadows, and whites of the Victorian photograph had their own moody charm, but for decades, colour was the holy grail—just out of reach.
In the mid-19th century, scientists and inventors began experimenting with ways to trap colour using light-sensitive materials. One of the first real breakthroughs came in 1861, when James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist, teamed up with Thomas Sutton, the inventor of the single-lens reflex camera. They created what’s generally recognised as the first colour photograph, a simple image of a tartan ribbon.
Their method involved taking three black and white photos of the same subject through red, green, and blue filters. Then, using those filtered negatives, they projected them back using matching coloured lights. When all three were overlaid on a screen, voilà, you got a rough version of the original colours.
The concept was brilliant. The execution? Less so. It was wildly complicated, and the photographic plates available at the time couldn’t pick up colours evenly. Red tones barely registered. You needed precise alignment and specialist projection equipment just to see the image. This wasn’t a method that everyday photographers could use, let alone the general public. Still, it planted a seed.
For the rest of the 19th century, colour photography remained the preserve of scientists, hobbyists, and the truly determined. Most people settled for either monochrome or had their photographs hand-coloured by artists—a time-consuming and costly process that could never be fully realistic.
What the world needed was something easier, more practical—and more magical.
Enter the Lumière Brothers
The solution came not from a lab but from a workshop in Lyon, where two brothers—Auguste and Louis Lumière—had already been making waves in another emerging field: cinema. The Lumières are perhaps best known for their 1895 film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, which is often hailed as one of the first motion pictures ever made. But just a few years later, they turned their inventive minds to the mystery of colour photography.
In 1903, they patented a technique that would become known as the Autochrome Lumière. By 1907, it was available to the public. And it changed everything.
The process was surprisingly low-tech on the surface. The Lumière brothers used potato starch (yes, actual potatoes) as the foundation of their invention. They took millions of tiny grains of starch and dyed them three colours: red-orange, green, and blue-violet. These coloured grains were then spread in a single, random layer over a glass plate, acting like a microscopic mosaic of filters.
On top of that, they added a thin layer of panchromatic black-and-white emulsion, which could record all wavelengths of light. When the plate was exposed in a camera, light passed through the starch grain filter, hitting the emulsion beneath. During development, the silver particles formed a positive transparency image—the colour, meanwhile, was “reconstructed” through the filter when viewed backlit. It wasn’t exactly intuitive, but the results were remarkable.
Seeing the World in Colour—for the First Time
Autochromes didn’t produce colour in the way we think of it today. There were no dazzling contrasts or pin-sharp clarity. But what you did get was a rich, soft, shimmering image—like peering into a memory rather than a photograph. It looked painterly, intimate, and full of mood. The tones blended into each other like pastels. Bright skies glowed, but could sometimes appear scattered with flecks of pink, green, or blue where the grains didn’t quite line up.
The result? Something close to what the Lumières themselves had envisioned—what they called “the colour of dreams.”
And people loved it. Artists, aristocrats, travellers, and even scientists adopted the medium. It offered something black and white never could: the chance to see things as they really looked, or at least as we wanted to remember them.
The Quirky Look and Feel of Autochrome
If you’ve ever seen a real Autochrome plate—or a faithful reproduction—you’ll notice a few things straight away. First, the colours don’t shout. They glow. There’s a warm, nostalgic haze to them, partly because the dyed potato starch grains were relatively large and irregular. Up close, the images can look like they’re made of dots—think pointillism in painting, or the grain of an old comic book panel.
Second, the image only really comes to life when it’s lit from behind. These were transparencies, not prints. You couldn’t just hang them on a wall and expect the colours to pop. You needed a diascope (a special backlit viewing box) or a projector. This made sharing Autochromes a little awkward, especially in public exhibitions.
Third, you had to be patient. Autochromes weren’t quick. Exposure times were long, so anything that moved—people, clouds, leaves—risked blurring. Taking an Autochrome was an event. You planned for it. You hoped for the right light. And when it all came together, you got something magical.
The Enthusiast’s Choice
Because of the cost and complexity, Autochrome was mostly taken up by those with time and means, think amateur artists, curious travellers, and upper-class hobbyists. But for those who embraced it, Autochrome offered something truly special. It straddled the line between documentation and artistry.
You could use it to capture a blooming garden, a misty coastline, or your children playing in the sunlight. And while the images weren’t practical for reproduction in newspapers or magazines, they became personal treasures, windows into a fleeting, more colourful world.
Albert Kahn and the Archives of the Planet
One man who understood the power of colour photography better than most was Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker with a utopian vision. Kahn believed that if people could see how others lived around the world—in vivid, relatable colour—they might understand each other better. And with understanding would come peace.
So, in 1909, he launched an ambitious project called Les Archives de la Planète (The Archives of the Planet). He sent photographers across the globe with Autochrome equipment to document everyday life: markets in Morocco, schoolchildren in Japan, fishermen in Norway, farmers in Algeria.
By the time the project was halted in 1931, his team had created more than 72,000 Autochrome plates, covering over 50 countries. It remains one of the most remarkable colour records of the pre-war world ever assembled. Many of these images are now housed at the Musée Albert-Kahn, just outside Paris.
Autochrome and the Printed Page
Though Autochrome wasn’t well suited to mass printing, it still found a role in journalism—particularly with the National Geographic Society. From the 1910s through to the 1930s, National Geographic used Autochromes and similar mosaic screen processes to bring colour to its readers.
They now hold around 15,000 original Autochrome plates in their archives, including scenes of 1920s Paris by Auguste Léon, and haunting street views of the city by W. Robert Moore in 1936—just years before the Nazis marched in.
The Fade Into Obscurity
As technology moved on, Autochrome began to show its age. In the 1930s, the Lumière company released updated versions—Filmcolour and Lumicolour—which came in sheet and roll film formats. But by then, newer technologies were on the rise.
Kodak released Kodachrome in 1935, and Agfa followed with Agfacolor Neu in 1936. These films used a completely different process—multi-layered emulsions that could capture colour more accurately and more conveniently. You could print from them. You could shoot faster. And you didn’t need a projector just to see your holiday snaps.
The final attempt to keep the Autochrome dream alive came in 1952 with the launch of Alticolour. But it didn’t catch on, and by 1955, production had ceased. After nearly fifty years, Autochrome quietly disappeared from public life.
Why It Still Matters
Autochrome might seem like a quaint footnote in photographic history now, but it was more than just a stepping stone. It was a moment where art and science met, where new technology didn’t just mimic reality—it transformed it.
Its grainy, soft-focus textures still feel alive today. Not because they’re technically perfect, but because they evoke something deeper—something human. A time, a place, a feeling. To look at an Autochrome is to gaze through a window into the past that doesn’t just show you what was there, but what it felt like to be there.
And maybe that’s the real magic of early colour photography—not just showing the world as it looked, but how it was lived.
Sources
Musée Albert-Kahn: www.albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr
National Geographic Society Archives: www.nationalgeographic.com
Kodak Historical Timeline: www.kodak.com
Lumière Autochrome patents (1903–1907): www.inpi.fr
The Dawn of Colour Photography by Michel Frizot and Cédric de Veigy (Thames & Hudson, 2007)
BBC – The Colour of Dreams: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet (2008 documentary)
