Photochrom Color Views

A photochrom is a color picture made from a black-and-white photograph by a person who decided what the colors should be. Understanding that is the whole key to looking at them.

The process was developed in Zurich in the 1880s. A black-and-white negative was transferred onto lithographic stones — usually between six and fifteen of them, one for each color — and each stone was hand-worked by a skilled lithographer who tinted the areas that stone would print. The stones were then run in sequence onto a single sheet. The result has the tonal detail of a photograph and the color of a painting, which is exactly what it is.

The colorists were working from notes. A photographer traveling in Egypt or Yellowstone would record what the light was doing and what color things were, and a craftsman in a Swiss workshop who had never left Europe would interpret those notes. Sometimes they got it exactly right. Sometimes a lake is a shade of blue that no lake has ever been.

The workshops were mostly Swiss and the trade was closely held. Photoglob in Zurich controlled the process and licensed it sparingly, and the craftsmen who worked the stones served long apprenticeships. A single view might take weeks and pass through a dozen hands, which is why the good ones repay close looking — there is judgment in every area of color.

The commercial peak ran from about 1890 to 1910, and the timing matters. This was the first period in which ordinary people traveled for pleasure in large numbers, and the photochrom was the souvenir. They were sold as prints, as postcards, and as bound albums, in every resort and railway station in Europe and America.

The subjects follow the tourist. Alpine villages. Venetian canals. Egyptian temples. Norwegian fjords. And in America: the national parks, Niagara Falls, the California missions, Atlantic City, Yellowstone's hot springs, the White Mountains, and the main street of any town with a hotel worth staying in.

The hot spring and geyser views are the ones that justify the whole process. Those are places where the color is the subject, and a black-and-white photograph tells you almost nothing about them. The photochrom, for all that it is an interpretation, gets closer to the experience than the negative does.

Detroit Publishing held the American rights and produced the bulk of what survives here. Their output ran to several thousand views before the firm collapsed in 1924.

The name causes confusion and it is worth settling. Photochrom and photochrome are the same process under different trade names. What it is not is hand-colored photography — in a hand-colored print, somebody paints on the surface of a finished photograph. A photochrom is printed in color from stones, which is why the color sits in the paper rather than on it.

One caution for anyone matching prints to negatives. The same photochrom was reprinted for decades with the colors adjusted between runs, so two copies of the same view can differ noticeably. Neither is more authentic than the other.

The Photographs You Look At Through a Viewer