Ok, I’m a bit late to the game with this one but I’ve only come across these colour pictures of Ireland taken in 1913. Now we can see how miserable we all looked…in colour!

The stills are part of a collection of autochrome pictures taken worldwide at the time. I find them fascinating, partially because as a child I thought the world was literally black and white up until around the fifties (yeah yeah yeah, look the logistics of the presumed changeover to colour didn’t weigh heavy on my mind at the time), but also because true colour pictures from that part of the century are rare. We are just so used to seeing the past in black and white.

The story behind the collection is that between 1909 and 1931, Albert Kahn, a French banker and philanthropist, spent a fortune sending photographers with this new colour equipment to countries across the world in order to compile a “kind of photographic inventory of the surface of the earth as it was occupied and organised by Man at the beginning of the 20th century.”

So to Ireland he sent two French women, Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon-Alba, on a two-month journey from Connemara to the Boyne Valley. Below is a gallery with some of the pictures taken by them. It may be an obvious thing to say, but everything from then seems more real in colour. Red and green in particular are two colours that stand out for me.

I also included pictures of London, Paris and New York (with the wonderful Plaza Hotel) because when the photographers noted about the dying Irish villages that “the young men leave for North America, the young women too and when the old die the house is abandoned and falls into ruin” I can’t help but wonder did they wish they’d pulled a different assignment out of the hat.

You can check out more about the collection here.

Meanwhile, when you think of colour pictures from the past, what’s the first thing that springs to mind? That’s right, Hitler!

I came across these pictures that Hitler had commissioned of his homes and offices. Again, seeing this era in colour is fascinating, but in more in an errie way with these.