Figure 1.--This is a French colorized CDV. It is not dated, but we believe was taken in the 1870s. A 1867 award is mentioned on the back. It is a very poorly colorized CDV. Some of the colorized CDVs were more artistically done. The studio was Mathieu Deroche in Paris.

From the very beginning of photography there was an interest in producing color images. Thre were ways of adding a little color to Dags and Ambros. The first real efforts to intriduce coloe was the colorization of albumen prints (CDVs and and cabinet cards). Sone of this was done crudely, but some colorized prints were done very expertly creating an image that looks close to a color print. The Lumière brothers invented an early color process (1903). Some claim it was the first true color process. Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky (Серге́й Миха́йлович Проку́дин-Го́рский) at about the same time produced even more vivbrant color images, but was more complicated and less commercially viable. The Lumière brothers called their process autochrome and began marketing it (1907). Billionare and philanthropist Albert Kahn decided to use the Autichrome process to create a color photographic record of human life on Earth (1909). He saw it as a way of promoting peace and fostering cross-cultural understanding. Kahn saw photography, especially color photography, as a mechanism of cataloging the human 'tribes' of the world and constructing a vibrant, colorful mosacic of humanity.

Created: 9:16 PM 4/19/2017
Last updated: 9:17 PM 4/19/2017