The US Library of Congress hosts a number of unique colorized postcards from modern-day Ukraine made by the Detroit Photographic Company, a photographic publishing firm launched in the late 1890s by Detroit businessman and publisher William A. Livingstone, Jr., and photographer and photo-publisher Edwin H. Husher. They obtained the exclusive rights to use the Swiss “Photochrom” process for converting black-and-white photographs into color images and printing them by photolithography. This process permitted the mass production of color postcards, prints, and albums for sale to the American market. The company existed until 1932, as the declining sale of photographs and postcards during World War I, and the introduction of new and cheaper printing methods used by competing firms brought them out of business. The colorizing method applied to monochrome photographs allows us to get a good feeling of how it was to actually live in Odesa in those days.
EuroMaidan press: Odesa circa 1890 in colored photographs
Passersby walk in front of Odesa’s famous Potemkin Stairs and the passenger terminal of the city’s seaport on Aug. 17, 2018.
