Autochromes without apologies

Abstract

From our vantage point, autochromes seem incredibly primitive. The glass-plate colour positive offered no simple possibilities for reproduction in print form at a time when the photographic print served as the chief measure of artistic skill and sensibility. Moreover, the design of the plates, which sandwiched the multi-colour filter screen and photographic emulsion, yielded a transparency that was too dense to be well projected. Likewise, the process of exposing the plate through the filter screen required relatively long exposures, so that the subject for colour photography needed to be either inanimate or extremely obedient. On balance, then, autochromes could not compete with the material advantages of an increasingly instantaneous, negative-positive, black-and-white form of photography - except, of course, in terms of colour. The colours of the autochromes were striking, simultaneously subtle and intense, and so novel in an age of monochromatic reproduction that the entire photographic world was forced to reexamine its conception of the medium: