Portrait of a woman

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025).

This 1915 image by Aucklander Robert Walrond is from a period we are used to seeing in black and white. It is among a series Walrond made using the first commercial colour photography process, the autochrome. Introduced in 1907, autochrome technology was complex and produced glass slides with dark, grainy images. Reproductions of autochromes, like this one, are usually lightened, revealing soft, muted tones. Many of Walrond’s surviving photographs are of flowers, a natural enough subject for a novel colour process. But he seldom turned his lens towards the people, places and events around him, leaving us to guess at a tantalising world of lost colour.