Photo colourisation by Sanna Dullaway / Original image from the Library of Congress
Crossposted from my HASTAC blog; you can find my original post here at the HASTAC site.
I’ve just read this fascinating short article on TIME’s website, A Vibrant Past: Colorizing the Archives of History. The magazine commissioned an artist to digitally colorise surviving photographs from Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. The results are, I think, quite startling and immediate. The artist, Sanna Dullaway, said:
“History has always been black and white to me, from the World War I soldiers to the 1800s, when ladies wore grand but colorless dresses … By colorizing, I watch the photos come alive, and suddenly the people feel more real and history becomes more tangible.”
There is certainly a very different quality and feel to the original black-and-white portrait of Lincoln below, versus the cleaned-up and polychrome version. This relatively simple use of digital technology greatly alters, in a very literal way, how we see a historical artefact.
They of course make me think of the photographs from the very early twentieth century which used a primitive colour photography technology, and prevent us with sometimes startlingly immediate images of a world which we largely think of in sepia tones: the photography commissioned by Albert Kahn, for instance, or the marvellous Prokudin-Gorskii collection, which document the Russian Empire just on the verge of revolution. Yet those photographs were “born” in colour, so to speak, whereas the Lincoln photos have been altered to appear in colour. We haven’t lost the originals, but for me there’s a tension between the two—does adding colour remove some of the exercise, some of the joy, of using our historical imagination? Does it potentially destabilise some of the artefact’s historical integrity—which one do people start thinking of as “real”? The carefully composed black-and-white image which captured a three-dimensional, polychrome world, or the new version which tries to “restore” colour? Are these reservations less important than the opportunity to reach new audiences and get them thinking about the past?