By Terry Teachout
Once upon a time--a quarter-century ago, to be
exact--colorization became a dirty word almost overnight. Ted
Turner had been marketing watery-looking "color" versions of
popular black-and-white movies, an enterprise that Gene Siskel and
Roger Ebert labeled "Hollywood's new vandalism." Ginger Rogers
agreed, declaring that it "feels terrible...to see yourself painted
up like a birthday cake on the television screen." Then, in 1989,
Mr. Turner announced plans to colorize "Citizen Kane," Orson
Welles's masterpiece, and Hollywood's patience ran out. Leading
directors like John Huston and Martin Scorsese declared their
opposition to colorization and, before long, Turner Entertainment
abandoned the practice.
To this day, the marketing of colorized prints of "Kane" and
other classic films of the past is still widely regarded as
unacceptable, even unthinkable. Historical photographs, on the
other hand, have come to be seen as fair game. Now that digital
technology has advanced to the point where it is possible to add
convincing-looking color to photos of the 19th and early 20th
centuries, the Internet is awash in electronically tinted portraits
of everybody from Anne Frank to Abraham Lincoln. What's more,
nobody seems to care. In the words of a blogger who posted "41
Realistically Colorized Historical Photos That Will Give You the
Chills, " colorization gives old photos "new life, stirring
emotions and making them feel more real than ever."
I agree--up to a point. In the hands of a sensitive,
historically knowledgeable artist like Sweden's Sanna Dullaway,
digital colorization can be not merely plausible but positively
seductive. To look at Ms. Dullaway's full-color versions of such
familiar photos as Alfred Eisenstaedt's "V-J Day in Times Square"
side by side with the originals is to appreciate the credo that
appears on her website: "No colorized photo can replace the
original black-and-white picture, but each will give you a new
perspective on how your grandparents and great-grandparents used to
see the world. Rather than living in the misty grey world we
usually see, the sun shone just as bright, if not more brightly, on
them."
That said, Ms. Dullaway's colorized photos, as she hastens to
admit, are not the real thing. They are, rather, immensely
sophisticated re-creations--falsifications, if you like--of the
past. This was brought home to me when I noticed that colorized
historical photographs by Ms. Dullaway and other retouchers were
starting to circulate on the web via Twitter. Some are clearly
labeled, but most are not, and my guess is that most people, seeing
these images for the first time, take it for granted that they are
not digital re-creations but original color photos.
Does that matter? Or is it old-fogeyism to grumble about a
technology that really does bring history to more obviously vivid
life? I confess to being both attracted and alarmed by the
communicative power of these photos. That's why I call them
"seductive": If you're not careful, they can sway you into
supposing that you're closer to the past than is actually the case.
In addition, though, it also troubles me that so many
people--especially those born after 1970, by which time color film
and prints were in common use by home photographers--seem to be
increasingly unwilling to "see" the lost world of the past in black
and white.
Back in the days when Picasso's "Guernica" was on display at New
York's Museum of Modern Art, an art critic I know eavesdropped on
two junior-high kids who were looking at that masterpiece for the
first time. He overheard one of them exclaim, apparently in all
seriousness, "It's in black and white--what a bummer!" Nowadays, I
gather, lots of kids of a similar age won't even bother to watch
black-and-white movies or TV shows. I shudder to think what they'd
make of "V-J Day in Times Square." Would it mean anything to them
at all without the crutch of colorization? Or would it simply be
yesterday's news?
In either case, I find it distressing that such photos are now
circulating in cyberspace without any warning that they're
colorized. As fascinating as it is to look at Ms. Dullaway's
retouched photos, I don't ever want to see them passed off as
authentic color images. To do so is to corrode the foundations of
historical reality. Would you trust a biographer or historian if
you found out that plausible-sounding unspoken "thoughts" that he
attributed to his subject were actually made up out of whole cloth
in order to punch up the narrative? I know I wouldn't. I don't want
"truthiness" from a scholar, nor do I want to find it in a magazine
or newspaper. What I want is the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth--even if it's in black and white.
Write to Terry Teachout at Terry.Teachout@wsj.com
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