Historic pics get the colour treatment

A new book infuses famous historic photos with colour, giving fresh perspective to the past

HE WAS the genius who invented a whole heap of stuff including the light bulb, record player and movie camera. Yes, we all know Thomas Edison – but why don’t the history books make any mention of the fact the American innovator had such striking eyes?

They’re almost the same colour blue as the sky over Kitty Hawk in North Carolina where Orville and Wilbur Wright prepared to make history with their glider test flights.

And who would ever have guessed that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had such knobbly pink knees?

That’s the problem with all the famous pictures from history before the mid-’60s – we’re so used to seeing them in black and white that it’s easy to fall into the trap of imagining that back then people inhabited a monochromatic world void of bright colours.

And that’s why these images from a new book, The Colour of Time, are simultaneously so fascinating and unsettling. They’re famous pictures we’ve seen countless times yet – through the use of digital magic – they’re cast in a completely new light.

Simply adding colour has brought to life events that had been consigned to the dusty pages of history books and given them a whole new dose of drama. From Emmeline Pankhurst digging in her heels and taking a stand for women’s rights on the rainy streets of London in 1914, to the tired, grubby yet jubilant faces of American troops at the end of the successful D-Day landings in France in 1944, key moments in history suddenly appear far more vivid and as “real” as if

they happened just yesterday.

And that’s exactly what the authors, Dan Jones and Marina Amaral, set out to do. “This book is an attempt to restore brilliance to a desaturated world,” they write. “It’s a history in colour.”

For Dan, a respected British historian, and Marina, a talented Brazilian digital colourist, it was a two-year labour of love. To start off they had to sift through more than 10 000 black-and-white photographs from 1850-1969 to find the ones that perfectly symbolise shifting points in world history.

Then Marina set to work – and it wasn’t just a case of choosing pretty colours to spruce up these old pictures.

“Conscience dictates that before you sit down to colourise a historical photograph you must do your homework,” she says. “A portrait of a soldier, say, will contain uniforms, medals, ribbons, patches, vehicles, skin, eye and hair colours. Where possible, each detail must be verified: traced via other visual or written sources.”

In other words, this is the closest glimpse you’ll ever get of how things actually were back then. It’s like stepping into a time machine.

Every single part of the picture is coloured by hand – which explains why it can take up to a month to colourise a single photo.

And the result? Well, take a look at the pictures and judge for yourself.

THE COLOUR OF TIME, BY DAN JONES & MARINA AMARAL (HEAD OF ZEUS). R478 FROM TAKEALOT.COM PRICE CORRECT AT THE TIME OF GOING TO PRINT AND SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE.

1 John F Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier on their wedding day in 1953 in Rhode Island, USA. At the time the future president was a newly elected senator and Bouvier a photographer for The Washington Times-Herald. 2 Adolf Hitler wearing a pair of lederhosen (leather breeches) and a shirt with a swastika armband. The picture was taken in the early ’20s when Hitler’s Nazi party’s popularity was growing in Germany. 3 British political activist Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested during a march to Buckingham Palace in May 1914. As demands for women to be given voting rights reached a militant crescendo, Pankhurst and her fellow suffragettes had frequent clashes with police. 4 Nelson Mandela in 1950. The digitally remastered photograph of the future South African statesman brings out the colour of his traditional Thembu beads. 5 Members of the US 4th Infantry Division and some of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne, take part in the D-Day Landings in Normandy, France, on 6 June 1944. The successful mission set the stage for Allied forces to take control of northwestern Europe from the Germans and ultimately bring an end to World War 2.

6 Jazz pioneer Louis Armstrong in 1944. 7 One of the Wright brothers in a glider flight above the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, USA. They made about 700 of these test flights before making history with the first powered flight on 17 December 1903. 8 Screen legend Marilyn Monroe speaks to reporters outside her house in New York in 1956. 9 Inventor Thomas Edison in 1878 with his phonograph, an amazing machine that could record sound and play it back.