The Autochrome plates by Batty Fischer

As part of a campaign to restore its collection of 300 Autochrome plates by Batty Fischer, the Photothèque de la Ville de Luxembourg. is organising a conference on the Luxembourg photographer's favourite technique for capturing the colour nuances of nature.

Invented in 1903 and commercialised between 1907 and 1934, the famous plate named “Autochrome” by the Lumière brothers is a transparent positive photograph whose colours are rendered by a very fine network of coloured potato starch.

So, more than 60 years after the invention of photography, here at last was the first colour photographic process to be marketed on a large scale and accessible to a wide audience of professional and amateur photographers. Like the daguerreotype, its monochrome ancestor, the Autochrome is a direct positive photograph, so it is a unique work of art, the direct result of the action of light in the camera, which gives it a very special value. The coloured potato starch gives it an aesthetic that will remain unequalled for its soft pointillist effect, particularly appreciated by followers of pictorialism and lovers of nature.

The Photothèque's remarkable collection reveals Batty Fischer as an excellent autochromist, who was one of the most avant-garde photographers to use colour in the early 20th century. Among the best-known photographers to have used this technique were Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Jacques Henri Lartigue and Heinrich Kühn.

Françoise Ploye's talk will provide an opportunity to discover the technical details of the Autochrome and to understand the conservation issues involved. We will also look at the work being done on the Batty Fischer collection to ensure that it is preserved for future generations.

Françoise Ploye is a qualified restorer of photographic heritage from the Institut National du Patrimoine (INP) in Paris. From 2002 to 2008, she was responsible for programming and implementing various preventive conservation and restoration projects at the Atelier de restauration et de conservation des photographies de la Ville de Paris. Since 2008, she has devoted herself to her own business, which offers a range of services dedicated to the preservation, dissemination and authentication of photographic heritage collections. In addition to publishing articles and holding conferences on her work, she has been teaching preventive conservation and the restoration of photographs at the INP since 2002.