Colour photography has had a long and detailed history, being explored over many years across the world. Early photographs could only be taken as monochrome images, displaying subjects as tones of silvers, greys or browns.

While monochrome photography was an impressive accomplishment, people began to yearn for colour images which could capture both the detail and the colour of the natural world. Photographers experimenting with various chemical solutions and combinations to see if they could create full colour images. Other photographers took a different approach, collaborating with artists which would hand colour images using oils, watercolours and powdered pigments to manually add in the desired colours. This method was often used for portraits, with many surviving daguerreotypes showing signs of being altered using these techniques.

Unfortunately this was a slow and tedious process, taking even well trained artists a long time to colour images..

The world’s first permanent colour photograph was taken by the photographer Thomas Sutton, who had a studio based in Jersey, from 1848 until it burnt down in 1854. Unfortunately his image could not be printed until 1937 using a completely separate photographic process. These new processes focused on the idea of layering green, red and blue in order to create all of the variations of hue and tone within the image, often using filters or gels.

The Autochrome, developed by the Lumière brothers in 1907, was a key part of colour photography’s history as it proved that colour images could be made, which lead to even more experimentation of the process, and the slow disappearance of hand tinted images. The Autochrome used coloured potato grain starch and glass plates in order to create accurate and detailed colour images.

As the autochrome spread, more and more photographers began developing their own photographic vocabulary and techniques, separate to that used by black and white image makers at the time. Autochromes were used in a variety of ways, from art to science.

While Autochrome’s grew in popularity, other colour methods were also developed, like the Kodachrome a mass produced colour film camera that used a subtractive colour method.

Coloured film cameras were popularised in the 1960s, and it was not an immediate switch for many photographers who believed that colour images would ruin the medium. However many people were able to utilise the medium in a unique and interesting way while still following photographic theory, one photographer being William Eggleston, credited with helping the medium be see as a legitimate way to create art.

Eggleston used colour film to capture colour in a completely unique way compared to the looks of previous colour photography methods, and his style has been influential for other colour photographers across decades, even after the introduction of digital cameras.