The Photochrom Mystery

Bombay, General View, 1895

(#4532, Detroit Publishing Co., 1899)

There were many ways of colorizing images before real color photography appeared by 1930. Among them, the Photochrom process stands out for its high quality. In 1900, The Detroit Publishing Co. called it ". . . the only successful means yet known of producing directly a photograph in the color of nature."

The Detroit Publishing Company was the only American firm to ever license the Photochrom process. William Henry Jackson became a partner in the firm in 1898. He worked with a Swiss scientist who brought the secret of this part photographic, part lithographic printing technology from Zurich to Detroit. It had been developed in 1890 by the Swiss publishing house Art Institute Orell Fussli, named after the inventor of the process. The Detroit brochure continued: "The Results combine the truthfulness of a photograph with the color and richness of an oil painting or the delicate tinting of the most exquisite watercolor."

Jim Hughes, the author of The Birth of a Century: Early Color Photographs of America, describes a Photochrom as " a continuous-tone color rendition of a black-and-white photograph that uses multiple impressions from lithographic stones (p.8)." Highly specialized and expensive materials from all over the world like graphite from Bavaria and asphalt coating from Syria were used to make a series of stones for each color, up to fourteen for a single print. Numerous chemical baths followed. How exactly the colors were placed upon the prints remains unknown. They could have been individually laid down on black-and-white photographs, or the photographs could have been printed with the colors.

The CD-ROM will contain the surviving Photochroms, and hundreds of high resolution black-and-white photographs of India by Jackson. A number of silver gelatin prints he made with a new Kodak camera will be shown. Photographs will be available individually, and edited together with Jackson's narration, music, live sounds and special effects into large-format QuickTime movies.