Colourful new take on history
THE COLOUR OF TIME
★★★★
by Dan Jones and Marina Amaral Head Of Zeus, £25
THE practice of colourising black-and-white photographs is not without its detractors. The early process of hand-tinting pictures to bring them to life ironically succeeded in making the subjects appear more artificial and less lifelike.
Digitisation has changed all that. This book, a collaboration between historian Dan Jones and Brazilian artist Marina Amaral, takes 200 photographs from the century between 1850 and 1960 and renders them into colour with the aim of giving them greater immediacy.
It is a century of empires and revolutions, cataclysmic social change and great technological progress. Images from Russia before and after the revolution share pages with figures before and after the American Civil War. Politicians and royalty alternate with soldiers and peasants, labourers and assassins, the living and the dead.
The accompanying text is a marvel of compression. Jones sketches with wry economy not only the historical context but the purpose of the photograph, from documented reality to shameless propaganda, from official portrait to candid snap.
Queen Victoria and Otto von Bismarck appear intractable, almost ruthless; Abraham Lincoln’s portrait is remarkable, the blue of his tie hinting at the blue in his eyes.
In spite of the adage, the camera lies all the time. The cannonballs on the site of the Battle of Balaclava are thought to have been placed there by the photographer Roger Fenton to romanticise the Charge of the Light Brigade. The portrait by Alexander Gardner of would-be assassin Lewis Powell, who stabbed US secretary of state William H Seward, depicts a confused, suicidal young man as an insouciant rebel. Taken in 1865, it could be mistaken for a portrait of River Phoenix.
Blues and reds dominate the pictures. Military uniforms and medals leap from the pages. Images take on a new dimension in colour, carefully balanced by Amaral to enhance skin tone, as in the photo of Amelia Earhart, or add contextual weight as in the VJ Day photo of a sailor kissing a girl in Manhattan.
There is much to enjoy here. As a history book, it acts as a fleeting guide to a tumultuous century. But as an aesthetic experiment it is remarkably successful.