Color

Many people,  some with far better developed sensibilities than what I’ve got, see black and white as superior to color in some ways.  I think they are the same people who claim that old vinyl records have a superior sound to modern, digital recordings but unless you specifically relish the sound of scratching, I can’t see that, either.

I love colors.  Beautiful, bright colors.  We went to see an exhibition of an artist friend of mine today, and it was quite enjoyable even though it was pretty small and the kids started fighting inside the museum, so maybe it was just as well we weren’t there long.

But, outside of linking to her page, that’s not what I’m writing about.

I’m writing about this series of colorized historical photos.  It’s a true and bizarre phenomenon that we tend to imagine the past occurred in black and white, because that’s the way we’ve seen it.  Any newsreel footage of WWII or WWI, for instance.

These pictures put things, quite literally, in a new light.  As historical document, some of the photos were quite interesting to start with.  The one, that’s kind of famous, of the big poster advertising the American Way, with the smiling family in the car, and the line of desperate unemployed people in front of the sign formed a pretty sharp contrast even  in black and white, but when the signs original, vibrant colors were re-added, it was even sharper.

Also, the photos that went way back to the 1860s were impressive.  There are few enough photos of that era that we tend to forget photography had been invented.  The colorized photos of President Lincoln are still actual photos of Lincoln.

My favorite photo, though, was the one of Audrey Hepburn smoking a cigarette while she checked something in the oven.  The colorization wasn’t really much of a factor.  It was just a very natural  view of a simpler time – and  one of the most beautiful women ever.