Hans Jakob Schmid was a Swiss lithographer who in the 1880s perfected a way of manually adding colour to black and white images. Known as Photochromes, they became wildly popular in the 1890s when true colour photography was still commercially unviable.
Schmid’s company, Photoglob, sold individual Photochromes and they were also available in travel albums featuring the work of Félix Bonfils, Jean Pascal Sébah and William Henry Jackson. They became so popular that the company licensed the process to others, such as the Detroit Photographic Company in the United States and the Photochrom Company of London.
Now more than 500 Photochromes are on display in Switzerland, representing a unique look at turn-of-the-century Europe, North Africa, North America and Asia.
• A Tour of the World in Photochromes runs at the Swiss Camera Museum in Vevey, Switzerland, until August 21. For more information see www.cameramuseum.ch.
John Dennehy is deputy editor of The Review.
