India. Ceylon. Colombo. Street Scene, after photo by Dr. Kurt Boeck

To make a photochrom, a photographic negative was transferred onto a lithographic stone, then printers created a minimum of six and up to fifteen different stones, each with a single color of ink, which were printed atop the black-and-white image. The printers creating the colors had never seen the original locale. Photochroms were popular from the 1890s into the 1910s and were most often collected in albums or framed and hung on the wall.