Happy holidays! With the advent of higher digital resolutions and more affordable access to digital editing technology, photography has become one of the most degraded and the most elevated artistic places for creativity. One of the great leaps in digital technology has been the ability to restore old photography. Being able to clean up scratched or eroded negatives or prints, ripped memories in picture books has never been easier. In line with restoration have come various creative folks and businesses that use their powers to colorize old black-and-white imagery.
One Twitter account I like to look at to get away from some of the noise of the political sphere is “Colorized pics.” The account pulls from digital creator accounts that focus on colorizing like sebcolorisation, Marina Amaral, pixelperfectrestorations, melodie_colors_the_past, and Cassowary Colorizations.
Since the photos go back to the earliest photo imagery from the late 1800s, many of the images include historical figures and war photography. I am of two minds about colorizing work that was created knowing it would be produced in black-and-white, but there is something fun and revitalizing about seeing still imagery from the past brought to color. It gives our brains a chance to break out of the structures we have all built up over the years of seeing old photos only in black-and-white.
Different colorists take different liberties with how they go about coloring. Some use more saturation, while others rely on more muted tones. Some like to highlight eyes or aspects of images, apply different levels of skin tone, makeup, and highlights. In any event, I hope you enjoy!
There are lush images.
Bright images.
Whose birthday is this? I think I know.
Images from a time before any of us were born. Like 1904!
1890!
Artsy, artsy kids… who would be like 130 years old today.
Some things change, and some things stay the same.
And, as always, war.
The survivors of war.
Consequences of war.
An artist who lived with a lot of pain.
Another person who lived with a lot of pain.
What some politicians would call early caravans.
And images of the people who were here before Europeans showed up.
Here is an image of what Democrats like FDR tried to fix.
And imagery of the world clearly lost to our collective memory.
Times Square looks a little different these days.
Portland also looks a little different these days—even if the beards and mustaches are the same.
Here’s the original “it girl.”
A tough mind.
Some things change, and some things stay the same.
Mark Twain.
One of the people chronicling our human condition.
Some things change...
Siam was renamed Thailand in 1939. Prince Chulalongkorn would have been about 12 years old when this photo was taken. He would ascend to the throne three years after this image was captured. Prince Chulalongkorn would implement a series of reforms between 1874 and 1900 to abolish slavery in his country.
Hound puppy.
We could do this forever! Let’s end with this image from over 100 years ago of an electric car.