Early Color · Unofficial
About Early Color
Early Color gathers the first half of the twentieth century in the color it was actually photographed in: autochrome glass, Kodachrome film, and three-color plates from seven public collections, browsable as one. It is an unofficial research interface: every record links back to its source institution, and every photograph is served by the institution that holds it.
The collections
- Charles W. Cushman: thirty years of American Kodachrome, 1938–1969, from Indiana University Libraries.
- Archives de la Planète: Albert Kahn’s operators on autochrome glass across four continents, 1909–1931, from the Musée départemental Albert-Kahn and Île-de-France Open Data.
- Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: three-exposure color surveys of the Russian Empire, 1905–1915, in the Library of Congress’s modern renderings.
- Contributing collections in the combined view: Fred Payne Clatworthy Autochromes (History Colorado), Charles C. Zoller Autochromes (George Eastman Museum), Frank Lauder’s Kansas City Autochromes (Kansas City Public Library), and the Early American Color group (multiple U.S. repositories).
Using the browser
- Search across captions, places, topics, people, and dates in every collection at once.
- Click any metadata, whether a state, a photographer, a year, or a process, to see everything that matches it.
- Refine with the filter panel; combine filters freely and remove them one chip at a time.
- Near me reads your location once, on this device only, and applies your state as a filter. Coordinates never leave your browser.
- Sort by date, place, or Random when you want the archive to surprise you.
- Save photographs with the heart; they gather privately at Saved, on this device only.
- Official records and the highest-resolution public images are one click away on every detail page.
Roots: the Cushman Browser
This project began as an unofficial revival of Indiana University’s retired Charles W. Cushman site, restoring its dense directories, linked metadata, and shareable searches, and grew outward from there. The Cushman collection keeps its own home, with roll-by-roll browsing, notebook text, and the original catalog metadata preserved on every record.
Attribution
Metadata from the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection was created under the direction of the Indiana University Archives and published by the Indiana University Libraries. Each collection’s landing page and every record carry their own source credits and official links.
Official IU Digital Collections collection | Metadata source repository