History

Mohammed Alim Khan (1880-1944), Emir of Bukhara, taken in 1911. This is an early colour photograph taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii as part of his work to document the Russian Empire. Three black-and-white photographs were taken through red, green and blue filters. The three resulting images were projected through similar filters. Combined on the projection screen, they created a full-colour image. When photographs were seen for the very first time, they were greeted with a sense of wonder....

The 1930s was the decade when the autochrome and all other screen processes on glass became obsolete as various tricolour printing processes were finally commercialised for those who could afford to use these services. Tricolour negatives could be routinely, if expensively, sent to the lab for reliable processing and printing, rather than be painstakingly tackled at home by the photographer. Black and white had long been the medium associated with both art photography and serious photojournalism, “black and white are the colours of photography” Robert Frank famously declared....

By the late 1970s, there was a “rush to colour” which Sally Eauclaire summarised in her curation of “The New Color Photography” (1981) at the International Center of Photography. She also published a book of the same name. The New Colour photography of the 1970s developed primarily in the United States as part of a photography boom. It grew from three sources: black and white photography traditions (from the fine print to street photography), the everyday amateur snapshot, and the colour saturated visual culture (television, cinema, picture magazines) of recent decades....