One of my Facebook (and real life) friends shared a link yesterday which seemed interesting so I followed it. It lead to; 36 Realistically Colorized Historical Photos Make the Past Seem Incredibly Real.
A new artistic trend has broken out around the world which changes our perception of history dramatically. Colorizing historic photographs from the late 1800′s and early 1900′s changes their appearance from something historic and different, into a scene from today. The colorful image of Albert Einstein sitting beside the water gives us an entire new perspective on the genius. He goes from a brilliant historic relic, into a living brilliance of our era. The colorized photograph of Audrey Hepburn transforms our thoughts of beauty. Her photo goes from an intriguing historic photo to one of a sexy starlet of today. Historic events move forward decades, or even a full century, by the addition of color carefully planned and applied by artists like Jordan Lloyd, Dana Keller, and Sanna Dullaway.
Now you might think of the colorization of old black and white movies that Turner Classic Movies did years ago and shake your head and want cringe. Not anywhere close.
The "Baltimore Slums", 1938 (Colorized by Jordan J Lloyd) and the "Old Gold Country store", 1939 (Colorized by Jordan J Lloyd) are just two that jumped out at me. But the one that made the most impact was not because of the colorization but the subject.
Jump over the Fleur-de-Kos and see what I mean.
During the Great Ohio River Flood of 1937, men and women in Louisville, Kentucky, line up seeking food and clothing from a relief station, in front of a billboard proclaiming, "World's Highest Standard of Living."
This picture is from
Life magazine, February 15, 1937.
As explained in the link, this picture became one of the iconic images from the Great Depression. There's a catch...
Bourke-White’s now-classic photograph, while it was certainly shot during the Great Depression, was in fact originally only one of many images she made while covering a far more particular, localized catastrophe: namely, the devastating Ohio River flood of 1937, which claimed close to 400 lives and left roughly one million people homeless across five states in the winter of that terrible year.
Once I knew the history behind the photograph, I of course looked up
Margaret Bourke-White.
Holy crap! What a life she lead.
Margaret Bourke-White (June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971) was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry, the first female war correspondent (and the first woman permitted to work in combat zones) and the first female photographer for Henry Luce's Life magazine, where her photograph appeared on the first cover. She died of Parkinson's disease about eighteen years after she developed her first symptoms.
A Google search of her
images will blow you away.
While the "American Way of Life" picture may have been misinterpreted, her other images from that period are just as moving and indicative of the suffering that was happening.
Click on the links for the colorized pics and some of her's.