28 Colorized Historical Photos and the Stories Behind Them

Black-and-white photographs put a quiet distance between us and the past. Add colour, and Albert Einstein becomes a man in sandals enjoying the sea air, and a Depression-era farm worker looks like someone you might pass in the street. The 28 images below were colorized by digital artists, among them Jordan Lloyd of Dynamichrome, Dana Keller and Sanna Dullaway, who work much as the hand-colourists of the nineteenth century did, only with software instead of brushes and dyes.

Hand-colouring is almost as old as photography: painters were tinting daguerreotypes within a few years of 1839, and studios in Japan turned it into a fine art from the 1860s. Modern colorists divide a scan into hundreds of regions and choose a colour for each, guided by historical records, surviving uniforms or fabrics, written descriptions and the grey tones in the original. Even so, many details are educated guesses. A coat that looks brown here may have been green. Treat these images as careful reconstructions rather than colour photographs, and they become a powerful way back into each moment. Several of them show the original and the colorized version side by side.

Portraits and places before 1900

Japanese archers, around 1860

Three archers in traditional dress practise with the long, asymmetric Japanese bow, the yumi. Photographs like this were made in the last years of the Edo period, just as Japan was reopening to foreign trade and foreign photographers. Archery was by then more a martial discipline than a battlefield skill, and it lives on today as kyūdō.

View from the Capitol, Nashville, 1864

View from the Capitol in Nashville, 1864

The ornate lamps stand on the terrace of the Tennessee State Capitol, which had been completed only a few years earlier. In 1864 Nashville was under Union occupation and served as a major supply base during the American Civil War, and army photographers documented the city and its defences. The colour version shows how a single gas lamp can anchor an otherwise sombre wartime scene.

Charles Darwin, 1874

The naturalist was in his mid-sixties when this portrait was signed and dated. On the Origin of Species had appeared fifteen years earlier, and The Descent of Man in 1871. The side-by-side version shows how colour softens the famous beard and gives the face a warmth the original lacks. Darwin died in 1882.

Abraham Lincoln, 1865

This seated portrait comes from the final months of Lincoln's life, as the Civil War was drawing to a close. Within weeks of portraits like this one, he was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865 and died the next morning. The lines on his face are a reminder of what four years of war had cost him.

Oscar II, King of Sweden and Norway, 1880

Oscar II ruled Sweden from 1872 until his death in 1907, and Norway until the two countries peacefully dissolved their union in 1905. A cultivated man who wrote poetry and supported scholarship, he is shown here in full ceremonial uniform with a plumed bicorne hat. Colour brings out the gold braid and the orders on his chest.

Walt Whitman, 1887

The American poet was 68 and partly paralysed after a stroke when this portrait was made, living in Camden, New Jersey. His collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, broke the rules of poetry with its free verse and its celebration of ordinary people. This colour version is signed by Dana Keller.

Thinkers and leaders

Mark Twain, around 1900

Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, relaxes in a garden chair in his trademark pale suit. By 1900 the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn was also a celebrated lecturer and a sharp critic of imperialism. He was born in 1835 during a visit of Halley's Comet and died in 1910, the year it returned.

Nikola Tesla

Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor, is best known for his work on alternating current systems, induction motors and radio-frequency experiments. This studio portrait, from around the time he was in his thirties, became one of the most reproduced images of him. Colour gives his famously intense stare an extra edge.

Theodore Roosevelt

The 26th president of the United States, in office from 1901 to 1909, is better remembered for the Rough Riders and conservation than for tender family scenes. Here he cradles a baby in a long christening gown. The colorist has added a blue tie and a warm brown jacket, details the original grey tones only hint at.

Albert Einstein on Long Island, 1939

Einstein spent the summer of 1939 at Cutchogue on Long Island, sailing and relaxing by the water. There the physicist Leo Szilard visited him about a letter, dated 2 August 1939, that warned President Franklin Roosevelt that Germany might build an atomic bomb. The relaxed figure in sandals and shorts makes it easy to forget the weight of what he signed that summer.

Everyday life between the wars

Washington, D.C., 1921

A boxy open car sits crumpled against a tree on a wet street while onlookers in overcoats inspect the damage. Press agencies in Washington photographed accidents like this routinely in the early motoring era, when cars were multiplying faster than traffic rules. The colour makes the scene feel startlingly modern.

Louisville, Kentucky, 1937

Margaret Bourke-White's photograph shows Black flood victims queuing for Red Cross relief beneath a billboard proclaiming the "World's Highest Standard of Living". It was taken after the Ohio River flood of January 1937, which put about 70 percent of Louisville under water, and first appeared in Life on 15 February 1937. The contrast between the smiling white family on the billboard and the line below made it one of the most powerful images of the Depression era.

Baltimore slums, 1938

A boy sits on the steps of a weathered wooden house in one of Baltimore's poor neighbourhoods. Government photographers documented housing like this in the late 1930s, partly to make the case for slum clearance and public housing. The patched jeans and bare boards look all the more real in colour.

Unemployed lumber worker and his wife, around 1939

Unemployed Lumber Worker and His Wife, circa 1939

This photograph of a couple in a makeshift camp is commonly credited to Dorothea Lange, who photographed migrant workers in the Pacific Northwest in 1939. The man's forearm reportedly carries his new Social Security number as a tattoo, a sign of how important that number from the 1935 Social Security Act had become to working people. Colour sharpens every detail of their tiredness.

Country store with an Old Gold sign, 1939

Men rest on the porch of a rural general store plastered with advertising signs, including one for Old Gold cigarettes, with a gasoline pump out front. Pictures like this, often credited to Dorothea Lange in North Carolina, captured how the country store worked as shop, filling station and meeting place. The red pump and painted signs are the colorist's reconstruction.

War, disaster and protest

Joseph Goebbels in Geneva, 1933

Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels scowls at a Jewish photographer, 1933

Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed the Nazi propaganda minister at the League of Nations in Geneva in September 1933. Goebbels had been friendly until he learned the photographer was Jewish, and his look turned to open hostility. Eisenstaedt later emigrated to the United States and became one of Life magazine's best-known photographers.

The Hindenburg disaster, 1937

On 6 May 1937 the German passenger airship Hindenburg caught fire while trying to land at Naval Air Station Lakehurst in New Jersey. It was destroyed in under a minute; 36 people died, 13 passengers, 22 crew members and one member of the ground crew, while many others survived. The disaster, filmed and photographed as it happened, effectively ended the era of passenger airships.

British troops board their train for the front, 1939

Smiling soldiers lean out of a train window in steel helmets in the first months of the Second World War, which Britain entered on 3 September 1939. Troops of the British Expeditionary Force were sent to France that autumn. The cheerful faces are a reminder of how few could imagine what the following years would bring.

Anne Frank, 1942

This portrait, dated May 1942, shows Anne Frank a few weeks before her 13th birthday, when she received the diary that made her name known worldwide. In July 1942 her family went into hiding in Amsterdam. They were betrayed and arrested in August 1944, and Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945, aged 15.

London, 1945

A small boy clutches a soft toy among the rubble of bombed houses. London was attacked by V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets until March 1945, and tens of thousands of homes were destroyed or damaged during the war. The boy's name is not recorded, which makes him stand for countless children who lost their homes.

Kissing the War Goodbye, 1945

On 14 August 1945, when news of Japan's surrender reached New York, US Navy photographer Victor Jorgensen captured a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square. Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed the same kiss from another angle, and his version became more famous. Jorgensen's picture, taken on official duty, is in the public domain.

Operation Crossroads, 1946

Operation Crossroads was a pair of US nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. This image shows the underwater "Baker" explosion of 25 July 1946, a 23-kiloton blast that threw a vast column of water and spray into the air among a fleet of target ships. The tests left the atoll contaminated, and its people, who had been moved away beforehand, never returned to live there permanently.

Thích Quảng Đức, 1963

On 11 June 1963 the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burned himself to death at a busy Saigon intersection in protest against the government of Ngô Đình Diệm, which he saw as persecuting Buddhists. Associated Press photographer Malcolm Browne took the original image, which won the World Press Photo of the Year award. It is included here as a documentary record of one of the defining protests of the twentieth century.

Stars of stage and screen

Charlie Chaplin, 1916

Without the bowler hat, cane and painted moustache of the Tramp, Chaplin is almost unrecognisable. In 1916 he was in his late twenties and had just signed with the Mutual Film Corporation, making him one of the highest-paid entertainers in the world. The colour reveals his striking blue eyes.

Big Jay McNeely, Olympic Auditorium, 1953

The rhythm and blues saxophonist was famous for honking solos played while lying on his back on stage. This photograph of the young crowd going wild at a show in Los Angeles is credited to photographer Bob Willoughby. It captures the energy that helped carry R&B toward rock and roll.

Elizabeth Taylor, 1956

Taylor was in her early twenties and already a major star when this casual photograph, reportedly taken around the making of Giant (1956), was shot. The film, with Rock Hudson and James Dean, became one of the defining dramas of the decade. Its colour version shows how candid set photography helped build the image of Hollywood stars.

Audrey Hepburn

The Belgian-born actress, who won an Academy Award for Roman Holiday (1953), is shown barefoot in a kitchen, checking the oven. Informal pictures like this were part of how studios presented their stars as approachable. Later in life Hepburn devoted herself to work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

How to look at colorized photographs

Colour can make history feel close, but it also adds choices that the original photographer never made. When you see a colorized image, look for the colorist's name and ask what the colours are based on: surviving objects, written descriptions or plain guesswork. The best artists research uniforms, paint schemes and skin tones carefully, and many publish the original next to their version, as several of the images above do.

It is also worth remembering that colour does not change what a photograph documents. Bourke-White's flood line, Browne's burning monk and the portrait of Anne Frank were already powerful in black and white. Colour simply removes one more barrier between viewers today and people who were every bit as real as we are.

Sources: Wikipedia: Hand-colouring of photographs; Hindenburg disaster; Operation Crossroads; Kissing the War Goodbye; Thích Quảng Đức; Einstein–Szilard letter; At the Time of the Louisville Flood; PetaPixel on Eisenstaedt's Goebbels portrait. Colorizations by Jordan Lloyd, Dana Keller and Sanna Dullaway; compiled via Indulgd, Imgur and Idealistic Revolution; related book on Amazon.

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