Lens Blog: Autochrome's Enduring Allure

Via the New York Times' Lens blog, a cool little story about the turn-of-the-century color process known as autochrome:


Looking through a loupe at the grain that makes up the gossamer colors of an autochrome is like looking at a pointillist painting, a miniature Georges Seurat.

Autochrome is a process developed in 1903 by the Lumière brothers in which glass plates were coated with a layer of potato starch mixed with color dyes that filtered light before it reached the emulsion. It yielded a grainy, positive image of muted pastels on a glass plate: a stained-glass window of the recent past. 

Read the rest here, and check out the entire National Geographic autochrome exhibit's website at the Steven Kasher gallery in New York.

-Jason Reimer