Product Details
Hardcover
185 pages
University of Iowa Press
Published 1993
Amazon.com
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... read more |
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