Photos Made With Potato Starch

The archives of National Geographic have almost 15,000 glass autochrome plates. In 1907, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, introduced the process which used dyed grains of potato starch as a filter. The first natural color photograph to appear in National Geographic magazine was an autochrome depicting a flower garden in Belgium, published in 1914. The magazine used the autochrome into the early 1930s when it was replaced by other newer processes, including Kodachrome.

Taking a Break
Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams, National Geographic

An Evening in the Park
Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams, National Geographic

Photograph by Jacob J. Gayer, National Geographic

"We're all familiar with old black and white images, so much so that we often think of images from the early 1900s as being exclusively in black and white," said Adrian Coakley, photographic research editor at National Geographic. "With autochrome, you're seeing those images in a way you wouldn't imagine them. It's like a look at history in color."

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