Artist brings colour to photographs from the First World War
Mark Truelove’s attention to detail gives photos from the front lines a new intensity
Mark Truelove still spends hours working meticulously in front of a computer screen, but now it’s for fun.
Truelove left the hectic world of London finance to move to B.C., where he took up the hobby of colourizing black-andwhite photos digitally.
He got so good at it, it’s become a paying job.
“After 20 years working in London, my creative side was hammering on the door saying, ‘Let me out!’ ” he said at his home in Hope.
Truelove turns old black-andwhite photos into rich textures that bring faces and fabrics to life.
The Vimy Foundation noticed.
Seeing Truelove’s work on Twitter, the Foundation approached him about doing a few samples for them of black-andwhite photographs from the First World War. (You can also view Truelove’s work on his Facebook page, Canadian Colour.)
The Vimy Foundation was overjoyed with the results and commissioned Truelove to colourize 150 photos over the span of a couple of years to commemorate the 100th anniversaries of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, which took place between April 9 and 12 in 1917, the Battle of Passchendaele in October/November 1917, and the end of the war in November, 1918.
“When I looked at what Mark had done with the first few photos we’d sent him, they almost looked three-dimensional,” Jeremy Diamond, executive director of the Vimy Foundation, said over the phone from Ottawa.
“They jumped off the page on the screen. There’s so much detail. You’re looking at the subject, but you’re also looking around at the sky, at the ground, at the hills.”
Canada was a nation of fewer than eight million people when the war broke out in August of 1914 and more than 60,000 Canadians died fighting, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, in a war not even declared by Parliament in Ottawa but at Westminster in London.
Vimy (more than 10,500 killed or wounded) and Passchendaele (more than 16,000 killed or wounded) were important battles for Canada. They were victories and highlighted the organizational skills of these colonial shock troops and their commanders.
How to pass along that vital history to young generations?
Anyone who has seen old film clips of the First World War knows there is a disconnect between those black-and-white, jerky, faster-than-normal moving pictures and the coloured reality around us.
“They look comedic almost,” Diamond said. “There’s a Laurel and Hardy element to those clips, a Chaplinesque look.
“By colourizing these photos of the First World War it allows a person to come alive off the page, for someone to think, ‘So that’s what my grandfather would have looked like.’ ”
A lot of the Vimy Foundation’s work is with high-school-aged kids through schools, youth groups and the like. This project began with the Foundation’s brain trust trying to figure out how they could appeal to teens for the centennial anniversaries.
BY COLOURIZING THESE PHOTOS ... IT ALLOWS A PERSON TO COME ALIVE OFF THE PAGE, FOR SOMEONE TO THINK, ‘SO THAT’S WHAT MY GRANDFATHER WOULD HAVE LOOKED LIKE.’ — Jeremy Diamond, Vimy Foundation
“To many 16-year-olds, 100 years ago may as well be 1,000 years ago,” Diamond said. “We wanted to create some contemporary context, make 100 years ago come alive and create some relevancy. Black and white just makes everyone look older, alien. Once the photos are colourized, the faces look like they may have been in a war last year, let alone 100 years ago.”
The Foundation, working in tandem with Library and Archives Canada, sent the photos to Truelove in batches.
“We wanted to try to tell the story of Canada’s role in the First World War, not only those in the trenches, but nurses, those that organized parades back home, those working in munitions factories, those playing baseball,” Diamond said.
That was perfect as far as Truelove was concerned.
“I have more fun with the common person,” the 47-year-old said. “The whole thing for me is about connecting across history and average people are more relatable to me than a prime minister.”
Google provides a wealth of source material to help him decide which colours to add, which colours are period appropriate. And for the Vimy project he relied heavily on Military Antiques and Collectibles of the Great War — A Canadian Collection, a book by J. Victor Taboika about the size of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
“If a dress from a 1914 photo is blue or green, it doesn’t matter, Truelove said. “As long as it’s not hot pink.”
For Vimy, Taboika’s book gave him all the guidance he needed for uniforms.
One of Diamond’s favourite Truelove colourizations, one not part of the Foundation’s project, is a photo of Walter Allward, the monument sculptor who created the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France.
“Walter conceptualized and built the Vimy monument in the early 1930s,” Diamond said. “There’s a great photo of him just at the start of it being built. You can see his pocket watch, cigarette, his hand is bandaged.
“Mark’s attention to detail when he colourized that photo, I just don’t think you’d look at it that closely if it was a contemporary photo, but because it’s historical you stare a little longer and in Mark’s work those additional details pop out at you.”
Truelove, who moved to B.C. in 2001, will not colourize a black-andwhite photo that was taken after the early 1960s. By that time, he figures, if the photographer shot with blackand-white film it was an artistic decision not to be trifled with.
He graduated from the University of Manchester with a degree in astrophysics, then worked in London as a web and database developer for banks and brokerages.
“I spent a lot of time working for financial institutions and I got tired of that,” Truelove said. “I wanted to see more of the world and thought Canada would be a more laid-back place than London.”
Truelove began his hobby by colourizing family photos. Depending on how many people and other complexities in a photo, colourizing one photo takes anywhere from three to 40 hours, he said.
“When I ran out of family photos, I started doing general historical photos at first, then decided to concentrate solely on Canadian history because that was the history I needed to learn.”
You can’t get more Canadian and historic than Vimy. The last Canadian veteran of the Great War died seven years ago. There is, as Diamond said, no one left to talk to about what the war was like.
A book with all 150 of Truelove’s colourizations will be published next year.
“This allows the people to come alive off the page,” Diamond said. “Our focus was to create an opportunity to tell an old story to a new generation.”