About this website

 

Purpose
It should be emphasized that this website serves no (geo) political purposes. The intention is only to show architecture and landscape beauty in its original context. There can also be no question of the idealization of the time around 1900. In addition to the aforementioned beauty, there was also a lot of personal suffering, poverty, housing shortages and problems with hygiene.

 

Photochrome
The Photochrome process was half photography and half an early form of printing. The process invented by a Swiss chemist Hans Jakob Schmid in the 1880's involved taking photographs in black and white, and making detailed notes on the colours within the scene, and then the negative being hand coloured. From the mid-1890s the process was licensed by other companies. Although the last Photochrome was printed in the 1970s, the method reached its peak in the years between 1890 and 1910. More information at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photochrom

 

 

Autochrome
The Autochrome Lumière is an early color photography process patented in 1903'by the Lumière brothers in France and first marketed in 1907. Autochrome plates are covered in microscopic red, green and blue coloured potato starch grains (about four million per square inch). When the photograph is taken, light passes through these colour filters to the photographic emulsion. The plate is processed to produce a positive transparency. Light, passing through the coloured starch grains, combines to recreate a full colour image of the original subject. Autochromes were mainly made until the end of the 1920s. After that the popularity decreased. More info at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochrome_Lumière