Colour Mania: Photographing the World in Autochrome — Catlin Langford, 2022

Published by Thames & Hudson in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, Colour Mania is a revelatory dive into the Autochrome process — the first widely adopted technology for colour photography, introduced by the Lumière brothers in 1907. Curated by Catlin Langford, this volume brings together a century-old world reanimated in soft hues and luminous grains, offering a visual archaeology of early 20th-century life in colour.

More than a technical feat, Autochrome brought atmosphere to photography — rendering its subjects with a dreamlike pastel realism somewhere between Impressionism and reportage. The book presents images from the V&A’s extensive archive, ranging from portraiture and landscapes to travel and ethnographic scenes, all made before Kodachrome's dominance. The figures, often anonymous, seem to emerge gently from their era, bathed in foggy light and aged pigments that resemble hand-tinted glass or oil on linen.

This is not nostalgia. It is the ghost of modernity arriving in colour for the first time — tentative, dazzling, and entirely new. In the lineage of photographic colour histories, Colour Mania is both scholarly and sensual, situating Autochrome as a vital threshold medium between painting and modern photography.

Title: Colour Mania: Photographing the World in Autochrome
Artist / Author: Catlin Langford
Date: 2022
Technique / Printing Method: Colour offset printing
Medium / Materials: Hardcover with dust jacket
Dimensions (cm): approx. 25 x 29 cm
Language (books): English
Pages (books): Unstated
Publisher / Editor (books): Thames & Hudson / Victoria and Albert Museum
ISBN: 978-0-500-48076-2
Condition: NEW