A Century of Colour Photography

Since the Lumiere brothers first made the autochrome process commercially available, colour photography has proliferated in so many directions that we are saturated with it. Pamela Roberts, a former Curator at the Royal Photographic Society, has gathered together an outstanding collection of colour photography from the last 100 years, from works in autochrome and other early processes whose freshness and clarity are still stunning, through the glamour of the 1930s, the social documentation of the 1940s and the magazine-led explosion of colour in the 1950s, to the popularisation of colour photography in the 1960s, experimentation in the 1970s and 1980s, and the new directions in which photography has developed around the world in the years preceeding and following the turn of the millennium.This comprehensive, informed and visually arresting collection of images is fascinating to anyone with an interest in photography, but it also grounds the different images in their time, showing how changes in society were often just as influential as technological developments in steering colour photography in new directions.