July 18, 2008
George Eastman House Autochrome Collection
The George Eastman House has joined the flickr commons and has included a set of early 20th Century autochromes which have been a source of fascination and inspiration for years.
Flickr Commons is a fantastic idea. My wish is that the whole thing could be taken further. Imagine an open source version of flickr dedicated to showing artwork and photography from public institutions in which users had the opportunity to contribute scholarly work or to group images into collections.
Note I did a quick and dirty color correction to the images I've posted above.
Related: Early Color Photography
07/19/08 08:45 PM
Ryan Donahue said...
Quick note:
Color correction isn't quite the appropriate term in this case.
Our autochromes -are- color corrected, to match the original object.
Chances are, even the day these were taken, they did not look like they are pictured above.
As a matter of principle, George Eastman House is committed to publishing these images in as true-to-life fashion as we possibly can, color imbalances and all!
Cheers!
Ryan Donahue
Webmaster, George Eastman House
07/20/08 12:48 AM
raul said...
Yes. The term color correction is probably misleading because as you note even as when they were first made, there were color casts and so on. I do imagine though that the original photographers would have probably loved to have get rid of color casts... Is there any record of Diascopes or magic lantern projectors having filters to try to adjust the final images?
07/24/08 11:20 AM
Ryan Donahue said...
Great question Raul, I will ask some of our people and get back to you!