30 Color Photos Photographers Took 100 Years Ago That Still Mesmerize Us Today

Historians date the oldest photograph to 1826 France. At least that's the oldest one that we know of today. That's when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce started experimenting with a camera obscura and took a snapshot of the view outside his window.

Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell took the world's first colored photograph. He experimented with red, blue, and green filters while photographing a ribbon. By projecting all three images onto a screen simultaneously, he was able to recreate the original image of the ribbon.

As evident from Niépce's and Maxwell's experiments, and as photographic process historian Mark Osterman told Bored Panda, the processes behind colored photographs were virtually unknown to the general public. "They were experimental," he explains. 

However, what Maxwell did back then isn't so far off from how we get color photographs with our cameras and phones. "If you look at your computer or phone camera screen with a strong magnifier, they both rely on exactly the same technology," Osterman explains. 

"You will see red, green, and blue lines," he goes on. "The other colors are based on those lines being next to each other. For instance, yellow is a virtual mixture of red and green lines next to each other. White is actually all three colors next to each other!"

French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière were the first to patent the autochrome: a method of color photography. What is the autochrome, exactly? It's when plates are covered in microscopic red, green, and blue grains of starch, and when light passes through them, it combines to recreate a full-color image of the original.

Even though the autochrome was patented in 1903, that doesn't mean that it was readily available to the public. "Only affluent amateur photographers were shooting them aside from the professional photographers, who worked for the National Geographic Magazine," Osterman told us. "This was because the color transparency plates could be used to produce three color printing plates to make full-color ink-printed reproductions in their magazines." 

"There was a two-color process invented around 1913 by Kodak that used two glass plates in contact with each other, one being red-orange and the other being green-blue," Osterman goes on. "Called the two-color Kodachrome process, it was beautiful, but the dyes being from Germany and the US entering the war made it impossible for Kodak to put the process into production. None were sold."