Member-only story
These 19th-Century Hand-Colored Photographs Are Magical
Japanese artist Ogawa Kazumasa helped perfect this stunning technique
It didn’t take long after the first daguerreotype was taken in France in 1839 for artists to invent ways to colorize their black-and-white photographs by hand. Ogawa Kazumasa was born in 1860, when hand-coloring was well established in his home country of Japan; before his death in 1929, he helped perfect the fine art technique, and also became a photographer, printer, publisher, and a pioneer in the fields of photomechanical printing and photography.
While the hand-colored aesthetic is still popular, genuine examples of hand-colored photography are hard to come by these days. While digitally-manipulated images can be beautiful in their own way, there’s something truly special about the real thing.
Each of Kazumasa’s floral images would be considered photographic gems even without the addition of these bright, bold colors. But hand-coloring adds another layer of beauty and otherworldly enchantment to each petal, stem, and leaf.
These photographs were originally published in two books in the 1890s, but they live on today in the public domain, as well as the book Some Japanese Flowers, which was most recently reprinted in 2013.
