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Article An Introduction to Photochromes
The Photochrome process was half photography and half an early form of printing. It produced vivid colour photographs around 50 years before colour photography was generally available, and allows us to have a glimpse back into the end of the 1800’s and early 1900's. Typically many of the British ones are around 1905. The process was around in one form or another for over 50 years, but the colour Photochromes of most interest to us were produced for between 10-15 years, and in this time coloured Photochromes were taken throughout the world in large numbers. We have made a collection of Photochromes of the whole of the British Isles including Ireland, and photographed and edited many of these to produce images that you could not otherwise get without a time machine. So far we have identified and obtained copies of around 1,500 covering England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. We have very many of these as originals, and have been able to photograph them and edit the images using Photoshop. Nikon Capture NX2 does not work so well with these as they are not really photographs but a form of a work of art being reproduced. Our end result is a photograph nearly to today's standard of a scene over 100 years ago. The next best thing to a time machine. These can be printed larger than the originals.
The printable
images we produce are very large files, with a number of layers, but we also have smaller jpegs,
that we produced at an earlier stage, before much of the editing off our larger
files, and these we have made available to you in the
Photo Archive,
Some we have several originals of, and this has allowed us to better see how they were produced and the variation to be found between them. We have not included duplicates in the archive. Due to their age some have survived in better condition than others, and while we have some that an Ambassador had, and have been kept in museum conditions, appearing like new, others can have a lot of marks and need a lot of editing to produce a good image. Originals are luckily not expensive, often you will find reproductions selling for more, making them an attractive area for the collector. This is probably because most people do not understand what they are. Few photographic history books have included them, considering them to be a printing rather than photographic process. Postcard sized Photochromes can be very cheap, and are easy to find and available in far larger numbers, there are so many of these about that we have not attempted to collect all of them, but do have a small number that we thought were specifically interesting, but these have not been so far added to our archive. There are also probably still quite a lot around, the American publishers, Detroit Publishing Company, produced up to 7 million copies in some years. They had between 10,000 and 30,000 different views available covering the world. Photochrome prints were sold at tourist sites and through mail order catalogues to globe trotters, armchair travellers, educators, and others to preserve in albums or put on display. Boxes that resemble a decorative bound book were also available to store large sets of images.
We have a few overseas ones as well, mostly because they are special in some way, such as multi section editions that produce panoramas and the like. The overseas editions we have not added so far to our archive. There is a story behind many
of the images, be it a railway bridge that was later knocked down when a ship
ran into it, local customs of the period or changes in the area. In addition to
this, some we have used as the basis for
Then
and Now Photography
Most European Photochromes, including British ones, are 9 by 6.5 inches although some of other sizes, including multiple print width panoramas were produced, and were on paper sheets that could be produced by the Detroit Photographic Company in the US and the Photochrom Company of London amongst others. Some versions were produced larger including some for special book publication,s but these were mostly later, although some used far earlier negatives. Smaller postcards were also produced by the Photochrome process by these and other publishers and this continued until 1970, Monochrome black and white or brown and white prints were also produced by this method. The American produced ones also varied in size, with a few much larger, and many being 3.75 by 7 inches. Most of the 9x6.5inche Photochromes have a number and title stamped in gold on the lower left or right corners. Where there is a PZ between the number and title these were produced by the Swiss company, standing for Photochrom and Photoglob Zürich. A French company also had a process to produce colour images they also called Photochrome, but this was a different process.
The Process and History The process invented by a Swiss chemist Hans Jakob Schmid in the 1880's involved taking photographs in black and white, and making detailed notes on the colours within the scene, and then the negative being hand coloured. Coloured gels (filters) were then used to project the image onto pieces of rock and the images etched, to produce a stone based printing tablet. Between 4 and 19 of these printing tablets (stones) were produced for a single picture and then used with up to 19 different coloured inks to print the image very tightly registered. A technique well advanced for a time when transport was by stage coach and new technology was a steam engine. The chemical process was not complicated, a tablet of lithographic limestone, known as a "litho stone," is coated with a light sensitive coating, comprising of a thin layer of purified bitumen dissolved in benzene. A reversed half-tone negative is then pressed against the coating and exposed to daylight for a period of 10–30 minutes in summer, up to several hours in winter. The image on the negative allows varying amounts of light to fall on different areas of the coating, causing the bitumen to harden and become resistant to normal solvents in proportion to the amount of light that falls on it. The coating is then washed in turpentine solutions to remove the unhardened bitumen and retouched in the tonal scale of the chosen colour to strengthen or soften the tones as required. Each tint is applied using a separate stone bearing the appropriate retouched image. The finished print is produced using usually at least six, but more commonly from 10 to 15, and up to 19 tint stones. If you look at a Photochrome with a magnifying glass then small coloured dots showing the grain of the stone used can be seen. Hans worked for the Swiss company Orell Gessner Füssli, a printing firm with a history extending back into the 16th century. Füssli founded the stock company Photochrom Zürich later renamed to Photoglob as the business vehicle for the commercial exploitation of this process and both Füssli and Photoglob continue to exist today. From the mid 1890s the process was licensed by them to other companies including the two mentioned above, who were really a part of the same business.
Getting your hands on copies Copies of scans are also available online:-
In all cases except our archive, I suspect its a mixture of the Photochrome sizes and Photochrome postcards. When time permits I intend to produce a comparison listing showing which UK prints are on which resources. Buying Originals
See also:
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