Tuesday 20 January 2026 – Thomas Smits and Melvin Wevers (Amsterdam): Orientalist pixels: How machine learning reveals the colonial color palette of early photography

This seminar is 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm GMT live on Zoom at https://zoom.us/j/98599080376 later posted to our YouTube channel.

Session chair: TBC

Abstract: This talk explores how digital methods can uncover hidden patterns in historical visual culture, specifically examining how color was used to construct Western ideas about the “Orient” in early 20th-century photography. Using a dataset of photochromes (hand-colored photographs) and autochromes (early color photographs) from 1890-1920, we applied machine learning techniques to analyze over 16 dominant colors in each image. Our algorithms could easily distinguish between Oriental and Western subjects in hand-colored photochromes, but struggled with the same task in naturally-colored autochromes. This digital analysis reveals that printers systematically used specific color palettes to reinforce colonial stereotypes about Middle Eastern and Asian cultures, while early color photography captured a more complex reality. The research demonstrates how computational methods can help historians understand the subtle ways that visual media shaped cultural perceptions and justified imperial power—showing that even something as seemingly objective as color could be deployed in service of colonial ideology.