Edwardians in colour

I’ve just watched Edwardians in Colour, part of BBC Four’s Edwardians season. This was an absolutely fascinating programme about French banker Albert Kahn and his archive of early colour photographs. At a time when most colour photographs were not true colour, but black and white with colour added later (like the photograph of George Flockhart and Beatrice Brown, my great-great grandparents, shown above), Kahn sent photographers around the world to record everyday life using a process called autochrome, which used photographic plates coated with potato starch grains dyed three different colours. The photographs are so fresh and true to life that they could almost have been taken yesterday, and it was so interesting to hear the stories behind them.

I love to see still photographs used to such great effect on television, in series like Ken Burns’ documentaries The Civil War and The West, and Stephen Poliakoff’s drama series Shooting the Past and Perfect Strangers, so I’m delighted to discover that this Edwardians in Colour programme was just the first part of a nine part series. I look forward to seeing the rest of the series, which will cover the Twenties as well as the Edwardian period.