Arhivski vjesnik, Vol. 57 No. 1, 2014.
Original scientific paper
Photochrom Prints Made According to Photographs by Franz Thiard De Laforest Present in the Catalog of the Photoglob Zurich Company
Hrvoje Gržina
; Hrvatski državni arhiv
Ivana Katušić
; Strossmayerova galerija starih majstora HAZU
Abstract
This paper presents the results of research conducted on the photochrom prints of the Photoglob Zürich Company that are kept in the Zürich Zentralbibiothek and at the Library of Congress in Washington. In spite of the fact that the technique, consisting of a photomechanical reproduction and multiplication of motifs originally recorded on photographic negatives, enjoyed a certain popularity at the turn of the nineteenth century, today it remains one of the lesser-known photomechanical processes and as such virtually unknown in Croatia, where it is usually wrongly identified even in the scarce studies. A detailed reading of the catalog of the Photoglob Zürich company and an analysis of the contents of the photochrom prints preserved in the above mentioned libraries have reliably demonstrated that, among the tens of thousands of motifs from across the globe – two hundred of which refer to the Croatian area – a part of the prints were created on the basis of photographs that Franz Thiard de Laforest had taken in the Dalmatian region during the second half of the nineteenth century and that were, for the most part, published in his great “Album from Dalmatia” in 1898. Given the fact that the names of the authors whose motives were photomechanically duplicated as photochroms are not widely known, the results presented in this paper shed new light on photography in Croatia and, particularly due to the fact that the said photochrom prints have spread throughout the world, also make a contribution to the history of photography as a whole.
Keywords
photography, photomechanical reproduction; photochrom print; Photoglob Zürich; Franz Thiard de Laforest; Dalmatia
Hrčak ID:
139173
URI
Publication date:
18.12.2014.
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