The 1910s in color

Photographs from the 1910s, 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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1910–1919

About these photographs

There are 80 photographs from the 1910s here: 38 of people and 42 of places and events.

Of the 80, 79 are glass negatives in the George Grantham Bain Collection and one is a glass negative in the Harris & Ewing Collection. The catalog names the photographer or studio for one of them: Harris & Ewing (Thomas Edison). It lists the Bain News Service as publisher of 79 of them and names no photographer.

Of the 80 dates here, 25 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. The catalog gives only a range of years for 38 of these pictures; so do the pages, and a range is filed under its middle year. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Booker T. Washington, Inez Milholland and Ferdinand von Zeppelin have no date in the catalog. These pictures are filed by the year each person died, the latest they can have been taken, so they may be older.

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 1910s

The Library of Congress dates most of the Bain collection from the 1900s to the mid-1920s, and its record lists the range of subjects: celebrities, parades, sports events, immigration, political events, aviation, World War I and the Mexican Revolution. The Library also notes the collection’s coverage of the campaign for women’s suffrage.

Kodak began selling sheet film in 1912, yet every original here is a glass negative. The picture of Thomas Edison comes from the Harris & Ewing Collection, whose titles, the Library notes, are taken from unverified caption data received with it.

Questions about photos from the 1910s

Are there real color photos from the 1910s?

Some: autochrome plates had been on sale since 1907, but they stayed rare next to black-and-white pictures. Every original on these pages is a black-and-white glass negative, so each color here was inferred by the model.

Can I restore a family photo from the 1910s 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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