Are you going on vacation? You can see what popular tourist destinations looked like 120 years ago thanks to a new series just starting. The first part focused on Greece. Old photochromic images, which were once used as postcards, show the appearance of the Acropolis, Delphi, Sparta, Olympia and the islands of Corfu and Zakynthos.
(Part 1 of the series) – Photography was still a very young industry at the time. It was not at all easy to get a good one back then, and the overwhelming majority were black and white. Nevertheless, color pictures were already being created at that time. However, they were usually hand-colored, like the photochromic prints in our photo gallery.
Old pictures taken with the photochrom method still amaze today with the quality of photographic craftsmanship and precise composition. Photochrom is a technique that creates colored images from a black and white negative. At the time when the twentieth century was born, this printing process was very popular with postcard manufacturers, which is why a number of photographs have been preserved that depict many European and world landmarks of that time.
An important producer of postcards was the American company Detroit Publishing Company, which accumulated a remarkably comprehensive archive, numbering several thousand photochromes from various corners of the world. Now this archive belongs to the collections of the Library of Congress.
In the series, we will gradually visit:
1. Greece, 2. Egypt, 3. Turkey, 4. Around Lake Garda in Italy, 5. Spain, 6. Rome, 7. Venice, 8. Austria, 9. Germany, 10. France.
