Artist injects colour into historic photos
It's Charles Darwin as you have never seen him before. Photographs of the Shropshire-born naturalist have always been in black and white – until now.
A Swedish artist has started to colourise images of a wide range of historical figures, including Darwin who was born in Shrewsbury in 1809. And now a photo, taken of Darwin in 1874, amazingly reveals how he would have looked had colour photography existed at the time.
Other figures frozen in time in black and white have also been vividly brought to life using colour including Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank, Theodore Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, who once performed in Shrewsbury, Albert Einstein and Mark Twain.
Even Alfred Eisenstaedt's iconic black and white VJ Day in Times Square image has been magically transformed into colour by Sanna Dullaway. The artist digitally colourises the files to produce realistic and modern versions of the portraits, which makes them look like they could have been taken only yesterday.
The 22-year-old artist first began colourising images in 2011, when she was listening to the debut album by rock band Rage Against the Machine. The self-titled album's cover art is a black-and-white picture of a self-immolating monk taken by AP photographer Malcolm Browne.
She colourised the entire picture and then posted the image online and it instantly went viral. Since that first experiment with colour, she has continued to colourise a wide range of historical figures.
"History has always been black and white to me, from the World War I soldiers to the 1800s, when ladies wore grand but colourless dresses," the artist says. "By colourising, I watch the photos come alive, and suddenly the people feel more real and history becomes more tangible."
On her website, Dullaway says she uses technology and artistic talent to turn black and white memories into colour.
"No colourised 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," she says.
"Rather than living in the misty grey world we usually see, the sun shone just as bright, if not more brightly, on them."
