The Paper Time Machine: Colouring the Past is a 2017 photo book that pairs famous and forgotten historical photographs with carefully researched colour versions. It is a collaboration between Wolfgang Wild, creator of the Retronaut history-photo project, and colourist Jordan J. Lloyd of the studio Dynamichrome. The hardback, published by Unbound, runs to 304 pages; the publisher describes some 130 black-and-white photographs restored and coloured by Lloyd, with each one set beside its original so readers can compare (some early reviews counted 124 colour plates).
The selection ranges from Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother and Lewis Hine's Powerhouse Mechanic to Antarctic ice caves, Ellis Island portraits and the Golden Gate Bridge under construction. Other chapters cover child labour in early 20th-century America, the building of the Statue of Liberty and the Crimean War.
Lloyd's argument is that colour shrinks the distance between us and the past. In his words, "seeing something from that long ago in color helps us understand it a little better." Below is a selection of the book's images, with the story behind each one. If you want the whole collection, the book is The Paper Time Machine on Amazon.
How colourisation works, and what it can't do
Digital colourisation is closer to research than to painting. Lloyd's approach, as the publisher describes it, is to check each element, from uniforms and vehicles to paint schemes and fabrics, against historical records before choosing a colour. Where records exist, the result can be close to what an observer would have seen.
Still, a colourised photo is an interpretation. Black-and-white film recorded brightness, not hue, so a grey tone can match many colours. Skin tones, sky and clothing often involve educated guesses. The best way to look at these images is the way the book presents them: side by side with the original, crediting both the photographer and the colourist.
Icons of American photography
Florence Owens Thompson and her children, Nipomo, California, March 1936. (Photo: Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress)
Migrant Mother was made by Dorothea Lange at a pea-pickers' camp in Nipomo while she worked for the Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration. The woman, Florence Owens Thompson, was born in 1903 on Cherokee land in Oklahoma and stayed anonymous until a Modesto Bee journalist identified her in 1978. Lange retouched the best-known frame to remove Thompson's thumb from the foreground, calling it a glaring defect.
Powerhouse mechanic working on a steam pump, 1920. (Photo: Lewis Hine)
Lewis Hine spent years documenting child labour for reform campaigners before turning, in the 1920s, to what he called "work portraits" celebrating skilled adult workers. This posed shot of a mechanic tightening a nut on a giant steam pump became one of the defining images of the industrial age, and was a model for later Art Deco imagery of labour.
Wilbur Wright flies the 1902 glider at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, 10 October 1902. (Photo: Library of Congress)
A year before their first powered flight, the Wright brothers tested this glider hundreds of times on the dunes near Kitty Hawk. The 1902 glider's control system, with a movable rudder linked to wing-warping, solved the turning problem that had defeated earlier designs. The same image was chosen for the book's cover.
Expeditions, war and faraway places
Ice grotto in Antarctica, 1911. (Photo: Herbert Ponting/Alexander Turnbull Library)
Herbert Ponting was the photographer on Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition. His pictures of a cave inside an iceberg, framing the ship in the distance, are among the most admired polar photographs ever taken. Scott and his four companions died on the return from the South Pole in 1912, and Ponting's images became a large part of how the expedition was remembered.
A Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber nose-down after a crash landing on a carrier deck in the Pacific, 1943. (Photo: Library of Congress)
The Dauntless was the US Navy's main carrier dive bomber in the early Pacific war and played a central role at the Battle of Midway in 1942. Landing on a pitching carrier deck was dangerous, and crash landings like this one were common. Colour brings out the deck markings and the crew's working uniforms that grey tones flatten.
Tourists climbing the Great Pyramid of Giza, between 1867 and 1899. (Photo: Maison Bonfils/Library of Congress)
The Bonfils family studio, based in Beirut, produced thousands of photographs of the Middle East for travellers and collectors. In the 19th century, visitors routinely climbed the Great Pyramid with the help of local guides, a practice that has long since been banned to protect the monument and visitors.
Cities being built and rebuilt
The Golden Gate Bridge under construction, 1934. (Photo: Library of Congress)
Construction began in 1933 and the bridge opened in May 1937, then the longest suspension span in the world. Its famous orange-red colour, officially "International Orange", was chosen partly for visibility in fog, which makes it an obvious subject for a colourist.
San Francisco about six weeks after the earthquake and fire of 1906. (Photo: Library of Congress)
The earthquake struck on 18 April 1906, and the fires that followed burned for days, destroying much of the city. Estimates of the death toll have risen over the decades to around 3,000 people. This aerial view matches the well-known panorama George R. Lawrence took from a camera lifted by kites in late May 1906, recording the ruined blocks as clean-up began.
Tower Bridge, London, under construction in 1889. (Photo: English Heritage/Getty Images)
Tower Bridge took eight years to build and opened in 1894. The photo shows the steel frame of the towers before it was clad in stone, revealing that the Gothic-looking landmark is, underneath, a piece of Victorian engineering.
Faces from Ellis Island
Augustus Sherman was a senior clerk at Ellis Island who, from about 1904 to 1924, photographed more than 200 arriving immigrants, often in their best or traditional clothes. His collection is held today by the New York Public Library and the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. Colour gives his sitters, many of them detained for questioning, a striking immediacy.
Algerian man at Ellis Island, about 1910. (Photo: Augustus Sherman/New York Public Library)
Algeria was then a French territory, and North African arrivals were comparatively rare at Ellis Island. Sherman photographed him in a white turban and flowing robe, clothing that set him apart from most passengers that year.
A Sámi ("Laplander") arrival at Ellis Island, about 1910. (Photo: Augustus Sherman/New York Public Library)
The Sámi are the Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, Finland and Russia's Kola Peninsula; "Laplander" was the term used in Sherman's day. Her red cap and blue tunic edged with bright bands are traditional Sámi dress, exactly the kind of detail colour restores.
A girl from Alsace-Lorraine at Ellis Island, about 1906. (Photo: Augustus Sherman/New York Public Library)
Alsace-Lorraine was annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, and many families from the region emigrated. Her huge black bow headdress is part of traditional Alsatian costume.
A woman from Guadeloupe at Ellis Island, about 1911. (Photo: Augustus Sherman/New York Public Library)
Guadeloupe, in the Caribbean, was a French colony and is today an overseas region of France. Her checked madras headwrap and jewellery reflect Creole dress of the French Antilles.
A Danish man at Ellis Island, 1909. (Photo: Augustus Sherman/New York Public Library)
Scandinavians made up a large share of arrivals in these years. Sherman shows this bearded man in a peaked cap and a dark jacket embroidered with small fleur-de-lis motifs, rendered in deep navy by the colourist.
Everyday life and curiosities
The Empire State Express of the New York Central Railroad on Washington Street, Syracuse, New York, 1905. (Photo: Library of Congress)
For decades, main-line trains ran at street level through central Syracuse, sharing the road with pedestrians and carriages. The Empire State Express was the railroad's prestige service between New York City and Buffalo.
Ocean Beach and the Cliff House, San Francisco, about 1902. (Photo: Library of Congress)
The turreted building on the cliff is the Victorian Cliff House built by Adolph Sutro in the 1890s, which burned down in 1907. A plainer restaurant later replaced it on the same site, and the beach view remains a San Francisco landmark.
Sumi and Sada Tamura, daughters of Teijiro Tamura, a former Third Secretary of the Japanese Embassy, Washington, D.C., 1925. (Photo: Library of Congress)
The two girls stand in kimonos beneath flowering cherry trees, with the Washington Monument behind them. The trees around the Tidal Basin were a 1912 gift from Tokyo, which makes this a fitting setting for a diplomat's daughters.
Moviegoers at the Chicago Theatre, 1949, photographed by a young Stanley Kubrick for Look magazine. (Photo: Stanley Kubrick/Look/Library of Congress)
Before he became a film director, Kubrick worked as a staff photographer for Look in his late teens and early twenties. His night view of the glowing Chicago marquee, rain-slick street and parked cars already hints at his eye for composition.
Engineer John Archibald Purves tests his Dynasphere at Weston-super-Mare, 1932.
The Dynasphere was a monowheel: the driver and engine sat inside a giant hoop and drove it forward along inner rails. Purves, who said he was inspired by a Leonardo da Vinci sketch, reached around 25 to 30 mph on the beach, but the machine was hard to steer and brake, and the driver's housing could spin inside the wheel, a problem known as "gerbiling".
A Japanese woman in samurai armour, about 1880.
Women of Japan's warrior class, known as onna-musha, trained to defend their households, and some fought in battle, most famously Nakano Takeko at Aizu in 1868. By the 1880s the samurai class had been abolished, and portraits like this were often posed in studios, so it is best read as a costume portrait rather than a battlefield photograph.
The cover of The Paper Time Machine: Colouring the Past by Wolfgang Wild and Jordan J. Lloyd.
The cover uses the colourised photo of Wilbur Wright's 1902 glider against a soft blue sky, a fitting choice for a book about seeing history with fresh eyes.
Why colour changes how we see history
Colour does not make a photograph more truthful, but it changes how we read it. Faces that look like museum pieces in monochrome start to look like neighbours; a 1906 street scene starts to look like a place you could walk into. That emotional effect is why colourised books and documentaries are so popular, and why careful research and honest credits matter. The original photographers, from Lange and Hine to Ponting and Sherman, did the hard work of witnessing. Colourists like Lloyd add a second layer of interpretation on top.
To explore more, visit Retronaut (website, Facebook, Instagram) and Jordan Lloyd's Dynamichrome (website, Facebook, Instagram). All colourisation shown here is by Jordan Lloyd.
Sources: AbeBooks: The Paper Time Machine (ISBN 9781783523740); Wikipedia: Migrant Mother; Wikipedia: Augustus Sherman; Wikipedia: Dynasphere; Wikipedia: Onna-musha; My Modern Met.
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