For many of us, the past was in black and white.
Logically, of course, we know that wasn’t the case, just as we know that the people we see walking very fast in films at the turn of the twentieth century didn’t actually walk as if speeded-up. But still, when we see an old black-and-white photograph, it tends to fit with the way we think the past was.
One reason for this is that we’ve all seen so many black-and-white pictures – online and also in the albums and shoeboxes of our family collections. We assume, perhaps subconsciously, that what we are looking at is the past, rather than simply a photographic impression of the past. The older a photograph is, the more likely it is to be in black and white – and, also, the more likely it is to be small, faded, scratched, even torn. The photographic record of the past often has those qualities, but we map those qualities onto the past itself.
But we’re wrong. The past wasn’t small, faded, scratched, torn – or in black and white. It was – as the ‘never-ending now’ always is – big, clear, sharp, complete and saturated in color. The past and the present were the same, are the same, and what has changed is not the nature of the present moment, but rather the technical recording capabilities of our cameras.
Ever since I can remember, the idea of going back in time has captivated me. In 2010, I started Retronaut to share the archive photographs I had discovered that, for me, disrupted the way I imagined the past. When I saw a picture like this, it tore a hole in my internal map of time. My mind did a double take: a sort of temporal vertigo, if you like. This experience, this Retronautic hit, was the closest I could get to fulfilling my childhood dream of travelling back in time.
One of the most powerful ways a photograph could disrupt my idea of the past was for it to be in color. A handful of inventors had experimented with color in the late 1800s and, in 1907, the Lumière brothers brought the first commercial photographic process to the market: the Autochrome. Even so, color photography remained very much the exception before the Second World War. The number of glimpses we have into the color of the past is tantalizingly few.
In June 2015, I saw the colorization work of Jordan J. Lloyd. Since starting Retronaut, I had seen many examples of photo colorization – photographs that were originally monochrome, which had color added to them digitally. The process is incredibly painstaking yet, in nearly every instance, these colorized photographs left me cold. One element or another of the color would just feel ever so slightly off, and the illusion would be over before it had begun.
In Jordan’s work, however, I encountered something curious – or, rather, two things. The first was that, in many of Jordan’s pieces, I simply couldn’t tell whether I was looking at an original color photograph or a colorized image, so well-executed were the results.
The second curious thing was this – after a while, I ceased to notice the color at all. For me, Jordan’s colorization was so good that the color was rendered invisible, and all I saw was the extreme reality of the past, presented to me in a new, visceral way. Jordan’s work propelled me into the past like you wouldn’t believe.
It then occurred to me: what if we were to take photographs that already had a Retronautic quality – photographs that, in monochrome, already disrupted the way I imagined the past – and then apply Jordan’s techniques? Would we get even closer to my childhood dream of time travel?
History as They Saw It is the result.
A number of people object to all image colorization. Some comment that a photograph is a work of art, created by an artist, and it is at the very least presumptive, if not immoral, to tamper with a piece that the artist regarded as complete. Others see the addition of color as an act of ‘dumbing down’, as though the viewer is regarded as incapable of appreciating photographs unless they are in color, or as not having the imagination to know that the past was a colorful place. Still others say that the monochrome images are simply visually stronger and more beautiful, and that adding color is a form of cultural vandalism.
We certainly understand these points of view. Jordan recognizes the integrity of the original photographs, and of the intent of their creators. We do not suggest that these versions of the original photographs are equal to the original, let alone substitutes. We also know that people are perfectly able to enjoy monochrome images, visually, historically and artistically.
Alongside this, as Jordan mentions at the end of the book, photographic colorization dates back to the very beginning of photography. The daguerreotype – the first publicly presented process for photography – was introduced to the world in 1839 by Louis Daguerre. Less than a year later, Johann Baptist Isenring created the first colorized daguerreotypes. Vast numbers of photographs were hand-colored across the nineteenth century and, perhaps surprisingly, the practice was at its height between 1900 and 1940.
Our own approach is perhaps best explained by the fact that Jordan and I are both musicians. We are familiar with the fact that when an artist records a song – for example, ‘Yesterday’ by The Beatles – other artists will often regularly re-record the same song. ‘Yesterday’, with 1,600 versions, is currently the most covered song of all time. We don’t believe those cover versions detract from the original – quite the opposite, in fact. Each version shows a new facet of the song and will almost certainly prompt you to listen to The Beatles’ original version again. For us, these photographs are visual cover versions.
The photographs I chose with Jordan reflect something of the sweep of photographic history from the 1830s until just after the Second World War. The earliest, surviving known photograph in the world dates from either 1826 or 1827, and History as They Saw It goes back to within almost a decade of that date, with the Robert Cornelius self-portrait of 1839 (p. 208).
c. 1850 - Hand-colored daguerreotype portrait of a woman (Antoine Claudet / The Finnish Museum of Photography)
A handful of the photographs in this book are extremely well known, such as Lewis Hine’s Power house mechanic (p. 70) and The train wreck at Montparnasse (p. 144). Others are taken by celebrated photographers, such as Margaret Bourke-White (p. 40), Roger Fenton (p. 200), Dorothea Lange (pp. 16, 18, 24) and Henry Fox Talbot (p. 206).
Some photographs are of well-known people such as blues singer Robert Johnson (p. 28), suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (p. 94), aviator Louis Blériot (p. 112), Alexander Graham Bell (p. 122), Jesse James (p. 186) and Abraham Lincoln (p. 204). Also of famous events: the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb (p. 62), the Armistice (p. 76), the sinking of the Titanic (p. 102), the American Civil War (pp. 188, 190, 192). Most of the pictures in History as They Saw It, however, are not of famous subjects, and are (as far as we can determine) by unknown photographers. Whatever the subject and whoever the photographer, our one goal has been to find photographic material capable of disrupting our collective sense of time.
We chose to start History as They Saw It just after the end of the Second World War; the most recent photograph is Stanley Kubrick’s photograph of the Chicago Theatre in 1949 (p. 4). This is because, as color photography became more widely available after the war, we have a tendency to imagine the post-war world in increasing amounts of color. The effect of History as They Saw It is at its strongest when we are not expecting to see any color at all.
In order to make History as They Saw It an even more powerful vehicle, we have also drawn on original comments, speeches, reports and other documentary material to bring the photographs into the now.
Having worked with Jordan on this book for eighteen months, I now know what it is about his approach that caused it to have such a strong impact on me, and what it is about his craft that, in my view, sets him apart as a colorizer. It is his research. Jordan uses exhaustive – and exhausting – levels of research concerning every single detail in a photograph. His goal is, wherever possible, to eliminate guesswork from his results, and even to eliminate his own subjective views and preferences, in order to create as accurate a reconstruction as possible. His goal is impossible to achieve, yet the fact that he reaches for it gives his images true depth.
You will notice that the overall feel of the color is very different from one picture to another. This is a factor of the underlying black-and-white information in the original photograph and, in particular, the levels of contrast across the image. What this means in practice is that for some pictures, such as of the XB-35 (p. 8), the color appears super-sharp and precise. For other pictures, such as of the construction of Nelson’s Column (p. 206), the color becomes much less distinct. Jordan allows the original photograph to dictate the way the color sits, and the result is a wide-ranging array of treatments, each working in harmony with the photographic source.
In all but one case, Jordan has also restored any damage to the original photograph: the fading, the scratches and the tears. To do this without undermining the historic information within the photograph is a delicate task. Jordan seeks to use as little correction as possible and, as you will see in his notes at the end of this book, is very clear about where he has repaired damage. The delicacy of his approach is self-evident to me and can yield spectacular results – witness the original picture of Lincoln in comparison to the colorized result (p. 204).
The one exception to this approach is the last photograph of the book: Robert Cornelius’s self-portrait (p. 208). Rather than attempt to digitally repair the extensive damage to the original plate, we decided to take a different route, and hinted at the color lying behind the damage. The result is one of my favorite pictures in the book.
As we were finishing History as They Saw It, I realized something else about Jordan’s work, and perhaps about the nature of the past itself. Although it may sound somewhat contrary, the pictures you see in this book are, in fact, not ones to which Jordan has added color – or, at least, that is not his intention. For Jordan, and for me, the color doesn’t need to be ‘added’ to the past; the past was in color already. Rather than adding color, what Jordan does – and what we have both sought to do – is to remove the black and white, literally and also metaphorically. The black and white, the filters through which we see the past, belong to each of us. We imagine the past in black and white, but it never was.
