
Color Photography of Early 1900s Paris - caublestone
http://curiouseggs.com/extremely-rare-color-photography-of-early-1900s-paris/
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diego_moita
These pictures are part of a huge collection assembled by the banker Albert
Kahn: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Kahn_(banker)>

Other pictures (about 1200) from the Albert Kahn collection, from other parts
of the world: [http://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.net/archives-de-la-
planete...](http://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.net/archives-de-la-
planete/mappemonde/)

There are some wonderful pictures in that collection. My preferred are the
ones with people living in a way that doesn't exist anymore like the ones from
the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), Ireland, Benin and South East Asia.

~~~
tcdent
There's also a BBC series titled The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn that
includes a selection of images and film with a little commentary thrown in for
context. I really enjoyed it.

[http://www.bbcshop.com/history/the-wonderful-world-of-
albert...](http://www.bbcshop.com/history/the-wonderful-world-of-albert-kahn-
dvd/invt/bbcdvd2855/)

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micampe
Russian version:
[http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_c...](http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html)

The photographs were taken on three black and white plates with RGB filters in
front of them, and could only be seen projected on a screen.

This is an article describing how the original images were composed to create
the color version <http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html> this is
about the russian guy, Prokudin-Gorskii, but the process he used to take the
pictures was the same.

On the LOC website you can see the originals and composite
<http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/prk2000000200/>

~~~
quasque
One interesting detail is that each colour exposure was temporally separated
by a small amount, which caused vibrantly colourful artefacts on the images
where the subjects moved - as can be seen on picture 27 in your first link,
and more subtly in picture 15.

Some of the ones at the LOC, even more so. Moving water has a particularly
curious, shimmering quality.

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te_platt
I'm amazed at how the color changes the emotional response I have for these
kinds of pictures. My mental image of 100 years ago seems very abstract, as if
events and people from that time have the same reality of Sherlock Holmes.
Somehow the color drives home the reality of where and who these people were.
It makes me wonder what effect color pictures, or even better - color movies,
from hundreds or thousands of years would have.

~~~
rhbrb
This had a bizarre reaction on me also, feels very disconcerting/jarring
seeing things like this in color and I can't quite understand why!

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RyanMcGreal
Other than the number of cars (more), balloons (fewer) and soldiers (fewer),
Paris looks pretty similar today.

~~~
kraymer
Could be interesting to juxtapose old/actual photos I immediately recognized
this perspective, in the (nowadays) turkish district :
<http://i.imgur.com/Lj5guCF.jpg> vs <http://goo.gl/maps/d7rDc>

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notahacker
There's a picture art book called _Revisiting Eugene Atget's Paris_ which
compares a famous photographers' early 20th century photographs of Paris and
similarly-exposed black and white shots from the same position almost 100
years later

~~~
c2prods
You're right, Atget's work is also particularly interesting! Here's a link to
some of his pictures: <http://openpn.tumblr.com/tagged/Atget>

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tokenadult
Cool photos. Thanks for the comments pointing to the set of photos of Russia
in the Library of Congress collection posted a while ago here on Hacker News.

For this set of photos of Paris, especially cool is to post a link to

<http://www.paris1914.com/>

(a multilingual website) on the basis of the Hacker News guideline

"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they
found on another site, submit the latter."

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

~~~
Stratoscope
While I generally agree with that sentiment, I'm actually very grateful for
the "blogspam" version that was linked to.

The <http://www.paris1914.com/> site has the worst user experience I've seen
in quite a while. Somebody went to a lot of work to make the site have all
those bells and whistles, and they totally blew it. It's just ridiculous! I
move the mouse over a picture and the picture flips around to show me some
info about it. OK, but what happened to the picture? I wanted to see the
picture. So I try to click, and that only works half the time. You have to
catch it quick before it flips around to display the title card. Good luck
with that. Then if the click registers, it does this weird two-way-but-not-
both-at-once animation and finally shows me the picture. Then I can close
that, lose my place, and pick some other picture to look at more or less
randomly.

This is NOT the way to make a photo gallery.

By contrast, the "blogspam" page has all the pictures in a simple page that I
can scroll up and down. Nothing fancy, nothing I can't figure out, and no way
to lose my place.

I was showing these pictures to a friend and it would have taken a good half
hour to poke our way through the paris1914 site. But thanks to the blogspam
page, we were able to enjoy all the photos in the time we had, without having
to fumble through some kind of misguided navigation.

Again, I don't disagree with your point about posting original sources, but in
this specific case, the blogspam was _very_ beneficial to me at least.

Edit: So I thought to myself, maybe I should give this thing another chance.
Once you get one of the photos open, maybe you can just skip from photo to
photo right there? Indeed you can, and it even has a keyboard interface: the
left and right arrows work just as expected.

But what's all this scrolling? It doesn't just change photos like a slide
show, it does an enormous sideways scroll of the whole thing. It's very
disorienting visually and not at all fun.

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bcoates
Beautiful. Similarly, Prokudin-Gorskii travelled Tsarist Russia in the decade
before the revolution, taking fantastic color photographs with three plates
and color filters: <http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/>

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lunaru
Everytime I look at historical photography my first thought is "All of those
people are dead." And yet, here we are with as many humans as ever and the
world is still alive and ticking.

Startup/business takeaway: don't underestimate humankind's ability to
transition into and out of roles while keeping the machinery moving.

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eCa
Fabulous.

Original source: <http://www.paris1914.com/>

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babesh
Wow. Paris hasn't changed that much other than the cars.

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lancewiggs
Wonderful. But the site's zoom setting don't allow for expanding the
post/photos to the width of an iPad. Very frustrating.

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justincormack
The comment "It is extremely astonishing to look at the world now long gone,
the world which you are used to see in black & white images and often with
poor quality." is a bit off the mark. Black and white pictures, by and large,
were excellent quality. eg look at Atget's pictures of Paris from the same
date (although done on much older equipment)
[http://www.googleartproject.com/en-gb/artist/eug%C3%A8ne-
atg...](http://www.googleartproject.com/en-gb/artist/eug%C3%A8ne-
atget/4132599/) or
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photographs_by_E...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photographs_by_Eug%C3%A8ne_Atget)

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davidroberts
This was right on the Eve of World War I. Sad to think that many of the young
men in uniform probably died in the trenches at Marne or Verdun over the next
several years.

~~~
diego_moita
These pictures are part of an huge collection made by the banker Albert Kahn
(I posted 2 links in another comment).

There are hundreds of them taken in the trenches of WWI in Central Europe,
Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. It is quite shocking to see how the poor and
simple people where impacted by the war.

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contingencies
Does anyone else collect early European postcards? I have a good few hundred
of them and am interested in collaborating to start an online museum.

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edouard1234567
My favorite : The one with the Michelin balloon which I think was taken at Le
Palais de la Decouverte (not 100% sure)

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othello
I'm almost sure it was taken at the Grand Palais.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Palais>

~~~
edouard1234567
right, same building.

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huhtenberg
This one [1] is hard to believe as it's a low-exposure night shot. I was under
the impression they lacked the technology to do that even in B/W back then,
no?

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/IHt7ypS.jpg>

~~~
tripa
Iùl not deep enough in photographer jargon to be sure I interpreted your
mention of "low exposure" correctly, but as I'd see it, that photo is of low
average exposure, and "normal" exposure on the light sources. And the
fireworks do look superposed: that hints at long exposure, which "cameras"
have been able to do before we even had camera lens.

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rayiner
TIL that neon lights were invented in the early 1900's.

Also: that first picture is a subway station.

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hayksaakian
Black and white photos make the past seem so much further away. The colors
truly make them feel real. Its hard to believe it was so long ago with such
vividness.

~~~
tomjen3
Indeed. Here is a picture (<http://i4.minus.com/ibokGCW1TVxmUA.jpg>) which has
been colorized.

(It is Ulysses Grant btw.)

His clothing looks out of date, but it just seems so real.

(Photo shamelessly stolen from www.reddit.com/r/colorizedhistory)

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pbhjpbhj
Mieux Que Nue [better than nude] at the Moulin Rouge.

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babesh
Wow. Paris doesn't look like its changed much.

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joshuaheard
Where are all the people? Paris today has the same buildings, but is overrun
by people and cars!

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jcoder
Beautiful, but it's too bad that the digital reproductions are so noisy.

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Turing_Machine
If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, it's not digital
noise. It's an artifact of the Autochrome process. The images are made with
colored grains of potato starch. It's a fascinating process that (to my
knowledge) has never been successfully reproduced in modern times.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochrome>

~~~
jcoder
That's really interesting---I assumed it was just really bad JPEG compression!

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Tekker
Wow - those are great.

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billforsternz
Paris (France). If I could snap my fingers and change one thing about how
Americans communicate, it would surely be to stop them saying Paris, France.
Or London, England. Or Moscow, Russia. Or ... many similar examples. Please
abandon this whole meme. Normal people know where the great cities of the
world are.

~~~
knowtheory
Yeah, if there's any such thing as a "Normal" person.

When discussing the salience of possible referents context is the major
determinant, especially with things like geographical proximity to one of a
possible set of similarly named cities.

If someone in Columbus, Ohio (as opposed to Georgia) is discussing travelling
to London, there's a non-trivial possibility that they were talking about
London, Ohio, rather than London, England.

Traveling Southwestern Ontario provides similar circumstance, given that the
British decided to name the entire province after England. London (Ontario)
sits at the fork of the Thames River, an hours drive from Stratford, which
likewise rests on the Avon.

So sure, maybe if you live in Europe, "normal" people always use "London" to
refer to the UK, but "normal" people in Toronto, probably mean the city in
Ontario when they use the name.

tl;dr: you're being a cultural imperialist.

~~~
billforsternz
I regret using the word "normal". However I am not being a cultural
imperialist. Sure, disambiguate where it makes sense. It would make sense for
people in Ontario to disambiguate London often. Paris, not so much. There is
absolutely no need for disambiguation in an article meant for a wide audience
and featuring iconic cityscapes complete with the Eiffel tower etc! The
"Paris, France" meme is endemic in North American media but completely absent
in the rest of the English speaking world.

