the blog quebecois

and the roses will die with the summer time
and our roads may be far apart
but there's one rose that dies not in Picardy
'tis the rose that I keep in my heart

-- Weatherley/Wood

A remarkable set of color photographs from World War I by Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud. I at first thought that they were hand-painted, but the technique actually predates the war:

Louis Lumière had already invented instant photographic plates and the Cinematographe when, in late 1903, he and his brother Auguste patented a new process for producing colour photographs : the Autochrome. Before the invention of the Autochrome, colours were separated using a complex three-colour process whereby three successive exposures had to be taken and then superimposed onto each other. Louis Lumière, however, devised a method of filtering light by using a single three-colour screen made up of millions of grains of potato starch dyed in three different colours. This mixture was then laid out on a varnished glass plate, which would be ready for use once it was coated in a black and white emulsion. Developing the plate entailed applying the same process as was used for black and white photographs at the time, with the impression being processed to reversal.

As with pointillist painting, the colour effect is rendered by viewing the image in its entirety, since the colours are created from the juxtaposition of the multitude of dots; indeed, the essential charm of these photographs derives from that very juxtaposition.

You can view the others here.