The Art of the Autochrome: The Birth of Color Photography [Hardcover]

John Wood (Editor), Merry A. Foresta (Foreword)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Those who have no sense of photographic history--and think of color photography as having its origins in the 1930s or '40s--may be stunned into silence by this homage to the invention that revolutionized the art form at the turn of the century. John Wood presents a selection of the finest surviving examples of the autochrome process here, including the work of still life masters Heinrich Kuhn and Wladimir Schohin, the painterly Antonin Personnaz, and the now-forgotten Gervais Courtellemont, whose work was widely published in National Geographic in the '20s. Wood also showcases the efforts of pre-Revolutionary Russian writer Leonid Andreyev and American studio portraitist J. B. Whitcomb, whose autochromes were not discovered until the '70s and '80s; the find of Andreyev's autochromes (by archivist Richard Davies) is trumpeted by the author as "one of the most important photographic discoveries ever made."

From Publishers Weekly

Photo-historian Wood ( The Daguerreotype ) here resonantly portrays a "more gracious naive" era in the art and craft of photography by focusing on turn-of-the-century photographers like Stieglitz, Steichen, Clarence White and Heinrich Kuhn, who employed autochrome, a particularly luminous starch-dye and glass-plate photographic color process. First presented in Paris in 1904 by the Lumiere brothers, autochrome has a nuance and fragility that seems to impose its own aesthetic on practitioners. In one example of the 75 included, Karl Struss's 1910 work, Boardwalk, L.I. , has a charm that eludes today's more glaring standards, in part, perhaps, because the muted softness inherent in the process mitigates the bright sunlight indicated by the numerous raised parasols. Wood's smart text also explains how the Photo-Secessionists, in their artistic and literary ferment, later rejected autochrome. Factual and evocative "Notes on the Plates" (far removed from their subjects by the antic tyranny of picture book design) would have benefited from same-page placement, thus enlightening--without distracting--the fortunate viewer.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 202 pages
• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press; 1 edition (August 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0877454132
• ISBN-13: 978-0877454137
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 8.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,819,489 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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