The Dawn of the Autochrome

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Young couple with motor car, c.1910. Photographer unknown.

An exhibition of extraordinary Edwardian colour photographs opens today at the National Media Museum, London Bradford.

This exhibition will open on the 25th May. Marking one hundred years of the first practical process for colour photography—the Autochrome, invented by the Lumiere brothers—the National Media Museum presents a major summer show on what has been described as “perhaps the most beautiful of all the photographic processes”.

Today, we take colour photography for granted. Yet, for many years colour photographs remained an elusive dream. One hundred years ago, the dream became a reality when the first fully practical method of colour photography appeared—the Autochrome process.

The Dawn of Colour celebrates centenary of the Autochrome and the birth of colour photography. It reveals the Edwardian world as you have probably never seen it before—in full, vibrant colour. The past isn’t always in black and white.

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The photographer’s daughter Christina at Lulworth cove,
Dorset in 1913 by Mervyn O’Gorman.

Guardian autochrome gallery

Previously on { feuilleton }
Fred Holland Day
The Door in the Wall
Edward Steichen
Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla

A literary recluse: The mystery of Pynchon

pynchon_simpsons.jpgThe cult writer is about to publish his first novel for nine years. But the best-selling author of V and Gravity’s Rainbow remains an enigma to his millions of fans. By Louise Jury

August 17, 2006
The Independent

He is so elusive a writer that he makes Harper Lee appear a socialite. He gives no interviews and shuns all photo opportunities. Thomas Pynchon, cult figure of American prose, is a nightmare for his publicists.

But the mystery surrounding the 69-year-old author will serve only to increase the clamour when his next novel, Against the Day, is published in December simultaneously in the UK and the US. It will be his first novel in nine years and only his sixth—plus a collection of early fiction—since his astonishing debut with V in 1963.

Finally announcing the date yesterday, Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape, his British publisher, said that to have a new work was “incredibly exciting”. He added: “Against the Day is an epic that is awesome in its scope and imagination.”

Continue reading “A literary recluse: The mystery of Pynchon”