The Lumière brothers’ Autochrome process
The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, best known as the inventors of cinema in 1895, developed a completely original method of colour photography, which they were the first to mass produce. On 17 December 1903, they obtained a patent for a process known as Autochrome – colour which derives from itself.
Having collaborated in the development of Gabriel Lippman’s interference process in 1891, starting in 1892 the Lumière brothers decided to dedicate their research to improving Louis Ducos du Hauron’s 1869 trichrome process.
The method developed by the Lumière brothers aimed to simplify the trichrome process by using a single plate containing a fine network of potato starch particles coloured blue, green and orange-red. They published their first results in 1904, and started production in 1907. From the 1930s on, along with the advent of the small format and the arrival on the market of new colour processes, the success of the autochrome plate began to decline.
The Swiss Camera Museum is home to a collection of the most interesting autochromes, including a remarkable collection of natures mortes by Andre Chapon. This French amateur photographer in the noble sense of the word set himself up in Lausanne at the end of the 1960s. He photographed landscapes, still life, and studies of plant matter, an area for which he had a serious passion.
Under the microscope:
Looking at a fragment of an autochrome plate, it was possible to see the network of orange-red, green and blue-violet microscopic potato starch grains. They acted like filters, colouring every point of the image in its true tint in relation to the black-and-white image which was behind it.