WWI in Color

These photographs, taken during 1917, the fourth year of the Great War, as it was then known, are Autochromes. The Autochrome was the first commercial color photographic process, and had been brought to the market a decade earlier, in 1907, by France’s Lumière Brothers.

The process they created used, improbably, a solution of dyed potato starch grains. It is the grains that give the pointillist quality to surviving autochromes such as these. Here, they capture the colors of a conflict which we more readily imagine in black and white.