The Early 20th Century Seen in Real Color

I hope you enjoyed this video! I certainly had fun making it, and I'm fascinated by these more personal views into the past. Might do a similar video about daguerreotypes sometime in the future.

Once you pass the age of 50 your perspective on 100 years feeling like a long time ago changes dramatically.

Makes me think... what's 100 years? That's nothing... it's such a short time. This was practically yesterday. And the older I get the more I feel that way. Time flies

It's such a strange and melancholy feeling, looking into the faces and lives of people that lived more than a century ago when they're in full color and looking just like us and our families. When you look at black and white or sepia photos there's a distance to them, like they're not quite real. But seeing them in full color like this really hammers home the fact that they were real people who loved, felt pain, struggled through life, and then died. It reminds you how fleeting we all are and how quickly we can be forgotten but also how we can assume no one will know we existed in a hundred years only to have millions looking at our private family photos and speculating about our lives. How strange it is to be human with our ever progressing technology.

I wish photography was invented 500 years earlier or even further back. Imagine if we have pictures of each century. It's like a real life time machine.

Seeing Cristina in those photos makes the present and past seem so interconnected. Instead of being a distant shadow in the past it drives home that she was a person just like you and me.

A relative of mine was early Autochrome pioneers. We inherited boxes full of Autochrome negatives including picture of my great-grandmother from 1907 in vivid colors. The glass negatives came straight from the Lumiere brothers who were helping him in his early attempts. Later he became very active and at least nationally famous color photographer.

I was born the year Christina died. Yet, it is crazy to think that even though we've lived for a moment at the same time, we saw and lived the world in a very different way.

Seeing Christina as a young woman in 1913 not even 18 yet is so surreal, it looked like it was taken just a few decades ago yet she's been gone from this world just 41 years. This drives home that she was alive at some point.

These coloured photos, just like the film “They Shall Not Grow Old”, bridges the past to the present for sure.

Christina was only a year older than me. You would think that she would look completely out of place posing like that for portraiture, but no. She looks like someone who could very well be my classmate. Crazy to think that if I was born at a different time period, and in a different body, we could've been friends. Seeing her and everything else in color is INSANE

For years as a kid I literally thought there must have been no colour in life back in the 1800's, and imagined how dull it must have been! It's wonderful to see how vibrant these images are after so long.

The architecture back then was truly divine.

These pictures are beautiful. If I didn't have any context I would of assumed these were taken in the 60s or 70s.

Christina looks like someone you'd see today. So much different than what you usually see in most B&W photos from that time.

My grandparents were born in 1900, 1901, 1902 and 1903... which makes them 2-5 years old when many of these photographs were taken in Paris. They all died over 30-40 years ago. This is really heartbreaking to think about... that they were happy small kids then, and are just gone now.

It’s still just absolutely baffling to me how we can live in an age where the people in these photographs are veeeery distant memories, yet each still existed with the same amount of humanity as everyone alive today does… thank god for these photos, seeing the past in color-photography is so unreal and fascinating, and it’s just unbelievable how much the world has changed

What a beautiful young woman Christina was. The pictures of her truly seem like they could have been taken yesterday, dispelling our conceited belief that we are somehow different- even "better" or "more evolved" than those from a hundred years ago. Thank you for all these stunning photographs, for their beauty, for showing me how wrong I was.

My maternal grandfather was born around 1860, and grew up to become a physician whose main hobby was photography. We still have many excellent black-and-white photos taken by him. I have a picture of his wife (my maternal grandmother) taken when she was in her teens; she was photographed standing beside her own mother. My mother was born in 1914 (the second youngest of thirteen!) and I have pictures of her as a toddler. On the other side of the family tree, my paternal grannie died in the1960's, at 102. I have a nice photo of her on her wedding day, sometime in the 1890's. I am presently scanning these photos in order to have a permanent copy, but I cannot help wondering what will happen to the originals after I die. I have quite a few relatives but they are mostly not interested in old things.

My father came back from WWI and began his career in photography in New York. At some point he jerry rigged a camera for aerial photographs. Eventually he moved back to Chicago where he earned his living in advertising art. He was noted as one of 10 best in that business and began teaching advertising art at Northwestern University. Arm and Hammer was one of his clients. We owe so much to those who forged development of photography. Thank you for taking the time to document these innovations!