A century ago, there was a race to make the first color photos. Now there's a race to save them.

National Geographic

a day ago

The revolutionary invention of autochromes changed photography. As those pictures decay, they're revealing a new kind of beauty. First digitized in 2008 (left), this 1937 photo of a dance performance in Mississippi was created using Dufaycolor, an early color-film product. By 2023, it had been transformed by a form of chemical deterioration known as vinegar syndrome. Photograph by J. Baylor Roberts, National Geographic Image Collection
In the early 1980s, the late National Geographic Society photographer turned archivist Volkmar Wentzel was delving through storage when he stumbled onto something both breathtaking and heartbreaking: a box of delicate glass panels, most of them the size of postcards, displaying color images captured in the early 20th century. Many were deteriorating, their once crisp scenes speckled with ghostly snowflakes, obscured by halos, and otherwise rendered surreal by time and neglect.
They were autochromes, the products of a turn-of-the-20th-century race to capture the world in all its color. And now the race was on to preserve them, even as time transformed them in extraordinary ways.
Introduced in 1907 by French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumière, autochrome technology was revolutionary in its day, relying on a light-sensitive silver emulsion covered with a fine layer of potato starch. That powdery extract—then popular as thickener, adhesive, and fabric stiffener—was crucial to capturing the chroma of the era. Microscopic particles dyed green, orange, and violet were scattered across a plate and sealed on with varnish. When light struck the plate through a camera's open shutter, each colored granule blocked a range of wavelengths corresponding to colors of the visible spectrum, exposing the emulsion beneath to countless tiny dots of variously filtered light. Some autochromes—early 20th-century color photos on glass plates—now have freckles from oxidizing silver particles, as in this undated, unidentified landscape. Unknown Photographer, National Geographic Image Collection
After a few chemical baths in a darkroom, the transparency that appeared on glass was, seen up close, a pointillistic mosaic. But pull back and shine light through the plate—covered with another glass layer, for protection—and a vivid, painterly image emerged.
National Geographic magazine's first full-time editor was an autochrome champion, commissioning and procuring glass plate works from photographers around the world. Because exposure times were long, much of early color photography consists of still lifes and landscapes, but National Geographic acquired dynamic images of life as it's lived: of crowded bazaars in Albania, of masked dancers in Tibet, of riders atop brightly garbed elephants in India.
Autochromes, together with similar processes involving glass plates, remained the primary means of making color photos until the 1935 debut of Kodachrome film, with its layers of emulsion that were themselves photosensitive. In the film era, the Society's glass plates were not carefully preserved. Wentzel, during more than 40 years as a National Geographic field photographer, saw value in the old photos while many of his peers were focused on innovation. When the Society thinned its collection in the 1960s, he rescued plates from the trash, taking them home for safekeeping and eventual return to the archive. Others simply moldered, forgotten, until Wentzel rediscovered them in off-site storage upon becoming the Society's first official photo archivist, in 1980. A Syrian desert patrol on camelback visits the ruins of Palmyra in a 1938 Dufaycolor. This version was scanned in 2012, before its acetate film began visibly degrading. Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic Image Collection In the past 13 years, the telltale blotch of vinegar syndrome has set in. 'Dufays' and autochromes are kept in cold storage today, which slows but doesn't halt such deterioration. Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic Image Collection
Wentzel made it a mission to preserve, catalog, and exhibit the old photos, and today National Geographic's Early Color Photography Collection comprises some 13,000 plates, including one of the world's largest assemblages of autochromes (the largest is at the Musée Albert-Kahn, outside Paris).
But as with many remaining early color photos, National Geographic's have been altered by light, heat, humidity, and improper handling. Plates have cracked and fissured. Oxidizing silver particles have created radiant, amoeba-shaped orange blotches. On the autochrome descendants known as Dufaycolors, violet bruises are evidence of 'vinegar syndrome,' a chemical decay affecting layers of film between glass. Named for its telltale scent and contagious from plate to plate, vinegar syndrome is 'a plague amongst photographic archives,' says Sara Manco, director of the National Geographic Society's photo and illustration archives. Degrading always sounds bad, but they're also developing, from documentary objects into a weird science-history project. Rebecca Dupont , National Geographic image archivist
It all sounds rather tragic, but the blemishes also have given many of the plates a strange new beauty. No longer pristine documents of history, they've become testaments to the ravages of time: abstracted, fragmented, and obscured, like so many ancient and admired artifacts. What's more, says image archivist Rebecca Dupont, witnessing the deterioration—a process that will only ever play out once—offers lessons about the science behind these objects.
'If you think about it, photography is still a relatively new medium, only 150 years old,' Dupont says. And the objects in the collection 'haven't yet reached the end of their lives. They're in a special stage right now where we get to see what happens to them.'
(These 18 autochrome photos will transport you to another era.) Exposure to humidity caused this Dufaycolor to fade and its film base to shrivel. As National Geographic archivist Sara Manco says, 'We'll never know what that image was like.' Photograph by Rudolf Balogh, National Geographic Image Collection
Even as the plates continue to deteriorate, some measure of permanence has been achieved. With a 2020 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Manco and a team of archivists spent three years digitizing the entire collection. These days, the originals are carefully organized in temperature-controlled storage. Those afflicted with vinegar syndrome are sequestered, and many broken ones have been painstakingly pieced together.
Despite all that care, the archivists know they can't preserve the plates forever—and they're OK with that.
'Degrading always sounds bad, but they're also developing, from documentary objects into a weird science-history project,' Dupont says. 'Are the images we're looking at being lost? Or are they just being changed into something new?' A version of this story appears in the August 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.