1905 | Turkish Mostar

Mavi Boncuk | 

Library of Congress print location

Print no. "17113". Forms part of: Views of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Photochrom print collection.

Mostar, Türken Viertel Photochrom[1] prints--Color--1890-1900.

Stari Most, the Old Bridge on Neretva, Mostar, Herzegovina 

Muhlen Bridge 

Cafe Luft

the Narenta 

 and Narenta Hotel, 

Narenta (Neretva) River

from the Detroit Publishing Co[2]., Catalogue J foreign section, Detroit, Mich. : Detroit Publishing Company, 1905.

[1]  Photochrom, Fotochrom, Photochrome[ or the Aäc process is a process for producing colorized images from a single black-and-white photographic negative via the direct photographic transfer of the negative onto lithographic printing plates. The process is a photographic variant of chromolithography (color lithography). Because no color information was preserved in the photographic process, the photographer would make detailed notes on the colors within the scene and use the notes to hand paint the negative before transferring the image through colored gels onto the printing plates.

The process was invented in the 1880s by Hans Jakob Schmid (1856–1924), an employee of the Swiss company Orell Gessner Füssli—a printing firm whose history began in the 16th century.[3] Füssli founded the stock company Photochrom Zürich (later Photoglob Zürich AG) as the business vehicle for the commercial exploitation of the process and both Füssli[3] and Photoglob[4] continue to exist today. From the mid-1890s the process was licensed by other companies, including the Detroit Photographic Company in the US (making it the basis of their "phostint" process), and the Photochrom Company of London.

Amongst the first commercial photographers to employ the technique were French photographer Félix Bonfils, British photographer Francis Frith and American photographer William Henry Jackson, all active in the 1880s.  The photochrom process was most popular in the 1890s, when true color photography was first developed but was still commercially impractical.

In 1898 the US Congress passed the Private Mailing Card Act which let private publishers produce postcards. These could be mailed for one cent each, while the letter rate was two cents. Publishers created thousands of photochrom prints, usually of cities or landscapes, and sold them as postcards. In this format, photochrom reproductions became popular. The Detroit Photographic Company reportedly produced as many as seven million photochrom prints in some years, and ten to thirty thousand different views were offered.

After World War I, which ended the craze for collecting photochrom postcards, the chief use of the process was for posters and art reproductions. The last photochrom printer operated up to 1970.

Process

A tablet of lithographic limestone called a "litho stone" was coated with a light-sensitive surface composed of a thin layer of purified bitumen dissolved in benzene. A reversed halftone negative was hand colored according to the sketch and notes taken at the scene, then pressed against the coating and exposed to daylight through gel filters, causing the bitumen to harden in proportion to the amount of light passing through each portion of the negative.[9] This would take ten to thirty minutes in summer and up to several hours in winter. A solvent such as turpentine was applied to remove the unhardened bitumen. The plate would be retouched to adjust the tonal scale, strengthening or softening tones as required. The image became imprinted on the stone in bitumen. Each tint was applied using a separate stone that bore the appropriate retouched image. The finished print was produced using at least six, but more commonly ten to fifteen, tint stones.

[2]  The Detroit Publishing Company was one of the major image publishers in the world for nearly 30 years from 1895 to 1924. The company produced prints of landscapes and city scenes across the United States and around the world. Incorporated in 1895 as the Photochrom Company in Detroit, Michigan, it was known until 1905 as the Detroit Photographic Company, and then the Detroit Publishing Company.

LOC collection of photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company Collection includes over 25,000 glass negatives and transparencies as well as about 300 color photolithograph prints, mostly of the eastern United States. Subjects strongly represented in the collection include city and town views, including streets and architecture; parks and gardens; recreation; and industrial and work scenes . 

The collection includes the work of a number of photographers, one of whom was the well known photographer William Henry Jackson. A small group within the larger collection includes about 900 mammoth plate photographs taken by William Henry Jackson along several railroad lines in the United States and Mexico in the 1880s and 1890s. The group also includes views of California, Wyoming and the Canadian Rockies.

The Detroit Publishing Company was started by publisher William A. Livingstone and photographer Edwin H. Husher in the late 19th century as the Detroit Photographic Company, it later became The Detroit Photochrom Company, and it was not until 1905 that the company called itself the Detroit Publishing Company.

The company acquired rights to a color printing process developed by Hans Jakob Schmid of Orell Fussli & Company of Switzerland called Photochrom. Photochrom allowed for the company to mass market postcards and other materials in color. The Detroit Detroit Publishing Company started to market this in 1907 under the name "photostint."

Restored photochrom print of Hotel del Coronado in Coronado, California, from a photograph by William Henry Jackson, c. 1900.

By the time of World War I, the company faced declining sales both due to the war economy and the competition from cheaper, more advanced printing methods. The company declared bankruptcy in 1924 and was liquidated in 1932.

The best-known photographer for the company was William Henry Jackson, who joined the company in 1897. He became the plant manager in 1903, and in 1905 the company changed its name.