“Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.” – Paul Gauguin
The yearning to capture the world in color has always been with us. Whether it was painting on walls in caves, crafting vegetable dyes for textiles, the development of oil paints, to experimenting with chemistry in photographic processes–the allure of color has motivated artists to represent the world as they experience it.
The autochrome, an ephemeral photographic process patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers, released commercially in 1907, and produced until the mid-1930′s, changed the possibilities of photography. Over a hundred years ago, what was once only available in monochrome, became possible for photographers–without great technical skill or a different camera–to capture the world in color as they saw it. During the brief 30-year history of the Lumière manufactured glass plates, photographers produced hundreds of thousands of autochromes. However, because of their inherent fragility and sensitivity to light, autochromes would later be supplanted by other more practical photographic processes, particularly the rise of Kodachrome in 1935. Alas, the autochrome would fade to memory.
Drawing on the resources of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, which houses one of the most extensive collections of autochromes, Color Mania: Photographing the World in Autochrome by Catlin Langford is a scholarly and considered reminder of our yearning for color. This new publication from Thames & Hudson reveals work that has never been shown, and helps us to understand the significance of autochromes in our shared photographic history.
To see the early 20th century in color is to see the world anew. The work of long forgotten photographic pioneers like Helen Messinger Murdoch, who was the first woman to travel the world taking autochromes, is included in the book. Her travel pictures from the early 1900′s remind us how modern autochromes can seem. We magically and immediately experience the past in color. The lush, painterly, pointillism look of the autochrome is unique. And like a language we have not heard in a long time, the images in Color Mania remind us how deep and mysterious that language can be. –Lane Nevares