WORDS Mary Garner VIDEO Vox on YouTube
Colorised photos are popularly shared through articles online to an eager and interested audience.
It’s thrilling to see in colour, the faces of famous people from throughout history, from Amelia Earhart to Charlie Chaplin as a young man.
Colorisation brings images to life, allowing you to see the people and places from the past as you would have seen it had you actually been there in that moment. It takes an enormous amount of research.
London-based artist Jordan Lloyd and his team at Dynamichrome make use of modern technology to digitally reconstruct old black and white photos, as accurately as possible.
“When you’re missing colour you’re kind of looking at the entire composition as a whole, whereas when you add the colour you start looking at the photograph in a slightly different way,” he says in the clip above. “You start picking up all these really interesting details that you might not have noticed before.”
But not everybody appreciates the practice of colorisation, saying that the original image is being vandalised when colorised. “These things are not supposed to be substitutes for original documents,” says Jordan. “It sits alongside the original, but it’s not a substitute, it’s a supplement.”
Watch the full clip above, by Coleman Lowndes for Vox, to find out more about this fascinating art form.
