Jules-Gervais Courtellemont was a photographer born in Paris in 1863 but who grew up in Algeria – then French territory.
He was best known as a World War I battlefield photographer, whose rare colour autochromes made for sensational recording. The technology was developed by the famous Lumière brothers. It was a slower procedure than the more advance colour systems that succeeded it so it was mostly suite to taking shots of still landscapes.
As the slideshow below illustrates, however, it could also be used to photograph people going about their ordinary lives, offering a privileged insight into what life looked like in the French capital in 1923.