It’s important to remember that the pre-photographers, those
wild experimenters and mad scientists who embarked on the
magical quest to invent the medium never intended to pioneer a
monochromatic art. From the start, they sought to create color
imagery. In 1850 the Reverend Levi Hill made the (somewhat
unsubstantiated) claim that he had “perfected” a process for
creating full color daguerreotypes, though the process was
unreliable and complex. Even Sir John Herschel was exploring
ways to introduce color into photography. The exciting
possibilities of color photography (finally) emerged in 1907.
The Lumière brothers introduced the Autochrome, a color
transparency coated with layers of potato starch dyed in red,
blue and green supported by a glass plate. Some autochromes
survive today and they’re gorgeous. The book The Dawn of Color
Photography illustrates a fantastic collection of images made in
1909 with this delicate and tedious process. When Kodak
introduced color film in 1935 the autochrome was rapidly mad