“Colorizing” the Black-and-White Past

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:06:41 +0000

Abraham Lincoln has been colored in by means of computer software. There are more color photographs of the past today than there have ever been before: and that is because people, like artist Sanna Dullaway, are using Photoshop to colorize black and white ones. In this post, I wonder why.

To approach an understanding, it will be helpful to consider a few examples of real color photographs taken in the later Nineteenth or early Twentieth Century. Color photography got its start with famed Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’swork on the perception of color in the 1850s, although it wasn't until 1907 that the Lumière brothers introduced the first commercially viable technology for color photography. In 1909, French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn (not to be confused with the architect by that name) hired professional photographers to go out and capture the world in true color. Here's a French scene from that groundbreaking series:

Image Credit: Musée Albert Kahn

With Lumière brothers' “Autochrome” technology, photographs from the early Twentieth Century started to flow. In the one below, a French soldier looks out from his post in Eglingen, Haut-Rhin: 1917.

Image Credit: Paul Castelnau

And below is a photograph of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who travelled the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915, capturing its peoples and places in color.

Image Credit: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress)

These photographs shock me into a realization so basic it is hard to put into words. History is really real. The old cities were really there, in full color. Men and women looked then like they do today; streams were blue then, hair was red, clouds were white, clothes were blue. The world was just as bright in the past as it is today. Hundreds, thousands, of years ago was fully as present to those living then as today is present to us. All the black and white photos and books through which I have learned about history had allowed a creeping sort of disbelief into my attitude towards the past. I realize I have sometimes equated the past with the media through which it has been made present to me. These color photographs inspire me to imagine the past anew as pulsing, felt, immediate.

Of course, color photography is a medium; it is still a technology for capturing a visual effect and reproducing it to a now distant viewer. The immediacy I am feeling is in my imagination. I think it is this feeling of immediacy which people who are colorizing black and white photos are trying to produce.

Image Credit: Sanna Dullaway

In this image, artist Sanna Dullaway has colorized Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic “V-J Day in Times Square,” originally published with the caption: In New York's Times Square a white-clad girl clutches her purse and skirt as an uninhibited sailor plants his lips squarely on hers.

It's like it happened yesterday.

William Eggleston

dsmith — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:22:32 +0000

William Eggleston pioneered the use of color photography as a valid visual art form. His 1976 MoMA exhibit was the first one-man show to feature color images. Like his friend Ed Ruscha, Eggleston’s a now legendary figure in contemporary art, and many articles and interviews with him are available in print and online, like this one by Jim Lewis. Unlike most photographers, however, Eggleston rarely takes more than one shot, and only occasionally makes use of the viewfinder. He points and clicks. His saturated color photos often reveal a world that borders on terror and hilarity—and the democratic range of his gaze provides dazzling and impersonal perspectives on U. S. cultural life. The opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet pays tribute to Eggleston’s saturated colors—and the tone of that film captures Eggleston’s sense of the macabre and decayed peripheries that surround us.

Although I admire the color and composition of his photographs, I appreciate more the perspective he brings to mundane things. One photograph form the 1970s reveals a number of shoes under a bed. In another, a child’s tricycle rises ominously over the driveway. There are pictures of gas stations and lonely fields of the Mississippi Delta. Human form does not receive special attention. Instead, it is absorbed into a body of work that values popular objects and landscapes equally. Eggleston’s perspectives make claims about what we see in a democracy and how we see it. That democracy is slightly warped intensifies the all too real values imposed by it. We’re fortunate to have Eggleston’s lens show us what is often not so readily available to our senses.

Work like his, however, confronts our understanding of rhetoric and visual communication. One photo, for instance, reveals only the inside of an oven. Such a mundane vision could be easily dismissed. But on further reflection, we might recall that ovens provide warmth and sustenance. Holiday birds and breads are baked in them. Here, the rectangular pit is striated with two metal racks, revealing an order and symmetry inherent in the design of daily objects we take for granted. Such symmetry reveals a preference for simplicity and utility: core values of democracy. The bare bulb in the back allows users to observe food as it cooks. The rust-stained bottom edge of the outer portion at the hinges suggests that this oven has been used for quite some time too, and the tile floor and doorframe to the right registers a situation wherein a middle class (or lower) sense of decorum is at stake. The oven is clean and symmetrical, and yet the signs of ware and use appeal to our sense of place and values. As viewers, we wonder about the domestic experience of this household. More significantly, the photo seems to ask us to reflect on what is shared and what is not. Certain properties in a democracy are held in common, while others separate us by class, race, gender. The photo argues that we share in certain ancient requirements of hearth to relieve the pangs of hunger. It claims too that the value of appliance and symmetry motivate our assumptions about home design, cooking, social exchange, and class. But perhaps this oven is clean not because of a tidy attention to domestic hygiene, but because it simply isn’t used that often. Perhaps it is rented along with the apartment, and the inhabitants require other domestic pleasures than home baked bread. Of course, a microwave could be on the countertop, making the oven almost obsolete. What does this tell us about a culture wherein obsolescence can so readily present itself as an option in our conception of domestic appliance?

Eggleston’s arguments about form and function in his photographs make him a peculiar and accurate witness to democratic spaces. The intimacy of his perspective is balanced with enough indifference to reveal the shared surfaces of our experience. Just enough incongruence, in Kenneth Burke’s sense, keeps his images alert to the experience of life in late 20th/early 21st century America.

viz. - Color Photography

“Colorizing” the Black-and-White Past

William Eggleston