BW pictures colorized in book

[Anita]

(12-05-2024 05:38 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  

Quote:For me it's the black and white historic photo that is dishonest in the sense that it doesn't represent reality. The color technology didn't exist but history has always happened in color. Color doesn't change what the photographer captured but creates what he really saw through the lens.
As an older person who grew up with black & white photography, I like its sense of nostalgia and the artistic way it can create mood, atmosphere. I also like seeing the world as Lincoln would have lived it- in color.

Anita,

I can certainly understand your point, and in a very limited way, I agree with you. It is interesting to those of us who are used to color photographs to see things in color, but when those photos were taken, the photographer was doing so in order to capture a moment in time. The German historian Leopold Von Ranke made the comment that Geschichte, wie sie tatsächlich passiert ist, or roughly translated, "we must study history as it actually happened." The same discussion took place when films in Hollywood were colorized. Did the colorized version change the feeling one got from the film? I think it did.

Plus, while I haven't read Cox's book yet, I don't know if he offered an explanation as to why the photos were colorized. I will have to see what he says.

Best
Rob

If you are looking at historic photographs in the form of the technology available at the time, then uncolorized photos capture that.

The demand for color photographs and attempts to color them started at the very beginning of photography. "The search immediately began for a means of capturing accurately not only the form but also the colours of nature."

"WHEN WAS COLOUR FIRST ADDED TO PHOTOGRAPHS?
In 1839, when photographs were seen for the very first time, they were greeted with a sense of wonder. However, this amazement was soon mixed with disappointment. People didn’t understand how a process that could record all aspects of a scene with such exquisite detail could fail so dismally to record its colours. The search immediately began for a means of capturing accurately not only the form but also the colours of nature.

While scientists, photographers, businessmen and experimenters laboured, the public became impatient. Photographers, eager to give their customers what they wanted, soon took the matter, literally, into their own hands and began to add colour to their monochrome images. As the writer of A Guide to Painting Photographic Portraits noted in 1851:

When the photographer has succeeded in obtaining a good likeness, it passes into the artist’s hands, who, with skill and colour, give to it a life-like and natural appearance."

https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk...hotography