A Collection of Incredible Rare Color Photographs of France in World War I

Serving in the French Army, photographer Fernand Cuville (1887–1927) continued the autochromists’ custom of recording the earth about them in good element. These colour pictures had been taken by Cuville in 1917. His shots seize French soldiers in everyday circumstances, like cleansing their clothing and ingesting lunch. They also present war’s destruction in scenes of crumbling structures and ruined landscapes.

h/t: vintag.es

By the early 20th century France’s empire extended from the Caribbean to Africa, south-east Asia and the Pacific. This enlargement had been accompanied by an powerful interest in the educational value of social geography and the systematic documentation that went with it. Pictures, and the autochrome in particular, was an perfect medium for capturing this sort of wide quantities of information and facts with fantastic precision.

The French banker Albert Kahn’s photographic project, Les Archives de la Planete, which was started in 1909 and intended to be a assortment of hundreds of autochromes arranged in geographical types, was a magnificent expression of this fascination. Castelnau and Cuville had contributed to this task.

With an eye for instructional depth, Cuville recorded lifetime in the French military, and the destruction of city and village daily life induced by German shelling. He brought an artistic language to his do the job which would length it from the horrific realities of war.

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