The 1900s in color

Photographs from the 1900s, restored and in color. Open one to compare it with the Library of Congress scan and read what the catalog record says.

Or just upload the photo: damage, color and sharpness are handled in one pass.

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1900–1909

About these photographs

Seven photographs are filed here, in order of date: Alexander Graham Bell, 1900; Matthew Henson, 1906; Theodore Roosevelt, 1907; Flatiron Building, 1908; Robert Koch, 1908; Brooklyn Bridge, 1909; and Luther Burbank, 1909.

Six are glass negatives in the George Grantham Bain Collection and one is a glass transparency in the Harris & Ewing Collection. The catalog names the photographer or studio for one of them: Harris & Ewing (Theodore Roosevelt). It lists the Bain News Service as publisher of six of them and names no photographer.

Six of these dates carry the catalog’s note “date created or published later by Bain”: the agency’s date may mark when it distributed a picture rather than when it was taken.

Every page names the collection, the digital file and the rights statement, and links the record. The color in each picture is inferred by the model, and the black-and-white “Restored” view was made from the color result.

How news photographs were made in the 1900s

According to the Library of Congress record of his collection, George Grantham Bain founded the first news photography service in New York City in 1898. His agency gathered pictures of people and events from around the world and distributed them to newspapers, with a special emphasis on New York City; it also received local pictures from the papers that subscribed to it, as part of their payment.

Kodak had sold roll film since 1889, yet every original here is on glass. The Library holds 39,744 of the Bain agency’s glass negatives and about 50,000 of its prints. The picture of Theodore Roosevelt comes from the Harris & Ewing Collection, which the Library estimates at 50,000 news photographs and 20,000 studio portraits of notable people.

Questions about photos from the 1900s

Are there real color photos from the 1900s?

Yes, from 1907: autochrome plates, the first color process sold to the public, recorded color on glass, though they stayed rare next to black-and-white pictures. Before them, color in a photograph was added by hand. The originals on these pages are black-and-white, and every color here was inferred by the model.

Can I restore a family photo from the 1900s like these?

Yes. Upload a scan or a phone photo of the print. A black-and-white photo comes back in color, with the color inferred by the model, and holding the photograph shows your original so you can compare before deciding whether to keep it.

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