- Photochrom
Photochrom ["Photochrom" is the spelling used by the Library of Congress, for historical reasons, in its classication and description of its collection of such images (see link below). Variants of the spelling, however, both in English and in German, exist. "Photochrome" is the English spelling used in some contexts, e.g even by the Library of Congress in its descriptions of a few of its images. "Fotochrom" is the German spelling used today by Orell Füssli, the Swiss company that originally invented the process.] is a lithographic print process used to generate
colorized images from black and whitephotographic negative s and is, despite the name, not a photographic process properly speaking. The original process used 10 lithographic stones, printing one color per stone, though historical variants of the process have used between 4 and 14 stones (colors).The photochrom process was most popular in the 1890s, when true color photography was first being developed but was still commercially impractical. The process was developed in Switzerland by Orell Füssli, a printing firm with a history extending back into the 16th century. [ [http://www.ofv.ch/index.php?&ID=uns_geschichte Orell Füssli Company History (in German)] ] Füssli founded the stock company Photoglob AG, as the business vehicle for the commercial exploitation of the process and both Füssli and Photoglob continue to exist today. [ [http://www.photoglob.ch/firma/firma.htm Photoglob AG Company History (in German)] ]
In the United States, Füssli/Photoglob licensed the process exlusively to the
Detroit Photographic Company . When the US Congress authorized the one-penny postcard, thousands of photochrom prints, usually of cities or landscapes, were created and sold as postcards and it is in this format that photochrome reproductions became most popular. [Marc Walter & Sabine Arque, "The World in 1900", Thames & Hudson, 2007 contains about 300 well-reproduced photochromes from around the world.]References
External links
* [http://www.photochrom.com/Photochrome.html About Photochroms]
* [http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/pgzquery.html The Library of Congress Public Domain Photochrom Prints Search]
* [http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?pp/fsaall,app,brum,detr,swann,look,gottscho,pan,horyd,genthe,var,cai,cd,hh,yan,bbcards,lomax,ils,prok,brhc,nclc,matpc,iucpub,tgmi,lamb,:@FIELD(SUBJ+@band(+Photochrom+prints+Color+1890+1900++)) 1890's Photochrom Prints]
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