Athens, early 20th century. A sea of red-tiled rooftops—without a single apartment block—spreads between Mount Lycabettus and the Acropolis. In between, the copper-covered dome of the Metropolitan Cathedral gleams under the Attic sun. Delos, before the sacred lake was drained in 1925, one of the original six Naxian marble lions stands guard by its shimmering waters. Mykonos, with its iconic windmills watching over the deep blue Aegean above the harbor of Chora.
These images, taken between 1908 and 1910, are some of the first color photographs ever captured of Athens and the Cycladic islands. Though the landscapes may be familiar, they surprise the eye—not rendered in black and white, but bathed in color thanks to autochrome, a pioneering photographic process that served as the “grandmother” of modern color photography.
These are among the earliest examples of color archaeological photography—rare, delicate, and largely unknown to the public. Recorded using the Lumière brothers’ 1904 invention, the autochrome technique involved capturing images on fragile glass plates coated with dyed potato starch grains. Very few of these photos have ever been published in academic journals. This collection is now emerging from obscurity—a precious visual archive of photography, archaeology, and topography—digitized and made accessible online, offering a rare color journey through early 20th-century Attica and the Cyclades.
The Photographer
Behind the camera was Joseph Sémonaire, an archaeologist and secretary of the French School of Athens during the 1920s. The rediscovery of his work—315 images in total, including transparencies, stereoscopic shots (which give a 3D effect), and negatives on glass plates—came about when his descendants donated the material to the French School at Athens in 2019, along with some of his original photographic equipment.
At the end of 2023, thanks to a project funded by France’s Ministry of Higher Education and Research, the “Archaeology of Transparency” initiative began. Led by the French School at Athens, the project aims to digitize 4,576 of the school’s more than 14,000 glass plates, focusing primarily on Delos. It also includes the study of five vintage cameras and 70 storage boxes used for the plates—including those from Sémonaire and another archaeologist, René Vallois.
“It’s astonishing material—color photographs of Delos from this period are extremely rare,” explains Marie Stahl, head of the French School’s archives. “We were thrilled when we opened the boxes and found the plates in such excellent condition. We had seen individual examples of autochromes before, but never a cohesive collection like this. It completely changes the game.”
“I knew who Sémonaire was,” Stahl continues, “but I didn’t realize he had such a personal passion for photography. Many of his peers at the time shared this interest, as photography was becoming an important tool for scientific documentation.”
She carefully lifts one of the glass plates with gloved hands, holding it up to the light to reveal its image.
A Dreamlike Glimpse into the Past
The Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erechtheion, the Temple of Athena Nike, distant views of the Acropolis from Mount Lycabettus, the mosaics of Delos, the shattered rows of its ancient theater, the House of Cleopatra—each image softened by translucent, dreamy colors. “They truly have an impressionistic quality,” Stahl says. The effect comes from the potato starch grains used in the autochrome process, which acted as color filters. Light passed through them onto the black-and-white emulsion below, producing a delicate, almost painterly result.
The First Commercial Color Process
“Most people don’t realize that color photography already existed in the early 1900s,” Stahl notes. “That’s what makes this collection so valuable—not just for archaeologists, but for photography historians as well. There were attempts at color images before autochrome, but this was the first technique that actually worked and became commercially viable.”
Can these photographs help archaeologists recover information lost over time? “That’s really a question for the archaeologists themselves,” she says. “My job is to preserve the material and provide access to it. But yes, these images can definitely shed light on the everyday practices of fieldwork at the time—the tools used, the organization of excavation sites. Understanding how archaeology was done in the past is itself a subject of historical study.”
A Fragile Process
What was the biggest challenge the French School faced in handling the archive from its arrival to its digitization? “Because the materials are so fragile,” Stahl explains, “we couldn’t inventory them before cleaning and digitizing them—as is normally done—but had to do it afterward. That reversed workflow was a particular challenge for us.”
