I’m fascinated with the pre-industrial world, when the world was still a huge place without a lot of infrastructure, and man was forced to live simply. One of the interesting things about WWI is that, while the world was by no means pre-industrial, much of the world was only starting to get a taste of mechanization, and those areas were still doing things the hard way.

But, when you think of imagery from the pre-industrial world, you think of black & white. Autochrome was a color photography process invented in 1903 by the Lumiere brothers who also pioneered cinematography. The autochromes have a true life feel, but with a very dreamlike or nostalgaic character of color. It’s nice to be able to see a full-color image (true color, not colorized) of the world before its wholesale homogenization. Here are a few examples:

In my meager research into my previous post, I stumbled upon these pictures from Shackleton’s voyage to the South Pole, also in color. This site from PBS is also interesting.

Along the lines of my previous post about pre-revolutionary Russia, I’ve found some more interesting sites with WWI-era color photography. It is a notable time-period because it marks the end of pre-mechanized warfare. We still see soldiers on horseback. We see a kind of hybrid between millenia-old warfare techniques, and the new technology like zeppelins, machine-guns, and bi-planes. All of the “new” technologies we see in WWI seem to be jury-rigged in 1914-18, yet by the time WWII comes around, those technologies start to mature and are ready for carnage (not that WWI wasn’t bloody).

WWI, especially as seen through these color photographs, seems to herald the end of the simpler, classical, perhaps more innocent age. An age of military campaigns limited by natural phenomena (threats carrying only so far as an army’s horses could drink, etc). WWI seems to humbly inagurate a new age characterized by exponential increases in technology, weapon range, and efficiency.

In a way, these color photographs are the last documentation of a fair fight on earth.


No Mans Land Seen From A French Observation Post
Autochrome color picture, made on June 16, 1917


A Soldier’s Lunch at the Place Royal in the city of Reims, France.


Girl playing with her doll. Reims, 1917.

It’s amazing to see these true-color photographs taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer to Tsar Nicholas II. The photos were taken between 1909-1915, after Bloody Sunday but before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

He employed a tricolor imaging system by taking three exposures of a scene, each with a different colored filter. Although he was photographing on black and white film, he had three color records and could then achieve the beautiful prints you see on the LOC site.