The Problem With Colorizing Historic Photographs
On Friday April 9, 2021, VICE Asia published an interview with Irish photographer and digital colorization artist Matt Loughrey. The piece featured headshots of people murdered in the Tuol Sleng / S21 prison in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. In the interview, Loughrey described his work restoring and colorizing these and other photos as part of a wider project title “The Colorful Past.” However, it didn’t take long for readers, photojournalists, and the family members of the victims to notice that Loughrey’s work went far beyond colorization. Loughrey also digitally manipulated the images to make it appear that the subjects of the photos were smiling. In at least one photo, he may have added a bloody handprint to the wall behind and above a subject’s head.
Two days later, following international outcry and the threat of legal action from the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, VICE Asia retracted the piece, replacing it with a statement that explained “the story did not meet the editorial standards of VICE and has been removed.” Since then, VICE has also removed an article featuring Loughrey’s manipulation of images of Australian women taken by the New South Wales police department between 1910 and 1930, stating that “After reviewing this article, and subsequent work from the artist … this article has been removed because it does not meet our editorial standards.” While both photo series are no longer featured on VICE, it is not difficult to locate them via a Google search.
While his example is a particularly egregious one, Loughrey is not alone in his fabrication of the truth and the reimagining of history. Rather, his work is an extreme example of a much larger technological hunger to colorize and digitally manipulate images in order to make them more ‘real.’ Such work does more than change the way history is perceived; it changes how the past itself is imagined. Such images reinforce harmful hierarchies of power and use technological innovation to overcome a lack of empathy for human beings who do not look or behave in ways that are unfamiliar to consumers of these images. In a virtual world where reality can be, and often is, distorted for political and personal reasons, it is imperative that we query why, and for whom, colorizing photos, especially photos of human suffering, is equated with “bringing the past to life.”
On a conceptual level, photography provides a tangible, tactile transcript of ‘reality’ that is often held up as a more accurate form of historical evidence than written or spoken accounts. However, because it was developed as a tool to capture and classify human difference, it is important to remember that a photograph itself is frequently evidence of an uneven or exploitative power relationship. This can be seen in terms of who becomes the subject of photographs, or in what circumstances, or the ways in which light-skin bias in color film and digital camera technology perpetuates the norm of whiteness. In such cases, colorization can be an act of reclamation.
Loughrey’s work is not this. According to a quote from the VICE piece, which endures thanks to its capture via screen-shot, Loughrey said:
I thought about this time and time again when I was working on them. We smile when we’re nervous. We smile when we have something to hide. One of the classic things is to try to be friendly with your captor. So a smile would seem natural. I’m sure it’s very easy for the oppressor to smile, because they have all the power, and when you see a smile, you may try to mirror it in order to become synchronized with your captor. To make yourself feel like you have some control.
Inscribing a narrative or a psychological process onto a historic subject, especially a historic subject whose voice is inaccessible, does the same kind of harm as forcibly manipulating their photograph. It demonstrates a complete lack of empathy or consideration for the individual experiences of another person.
But it is this lack of empathy and the eagerness to make technology translate the past for us that should make us question the need to colorize and update historic photos in general. Too often, spectators of colorized and digitally enhanced images insist that color enables empathy. In an article addressing this very topic in The Irish Times, Sean Sheehan notes the “vibrancy that colour brings is something of value for an Instagram generation distanced from past events; history seen in black and white risks becoming indelibly antiquated.”
Likewise, color and technological manipulation is too often associated with truth. The makers of the recently-launched DeepNostagia app, which enhances and animates old photographs, markets their product as a way to bring “our beloved ancestors... to life [and]...lets us imagine how they might have been in reality.” Likewise, reviews of Peter Jackson’s 2018 Academy-Award-winning film “They Shall Not Grow Old” celebrated the film’s ability to return long-dead soldiers “to an eerie, hyperreal kind of life in front of our eyes.” While the technological advancements required to produce such images are remarkable, the praise and attention lavished on them seems rooted in the capitalistic entertainment these images provide, ignoring how they might enhance or harm our understanding of a photo’s subject, their actual lived experiences, or their agency (or lack thereof) in the composition of the image.
Insisting that an image must be in color, and hyperreal color at that, to be considered “true” or worthy of empathy carries dangerous implications. It suggests that our role is that of consumers, rather than of scholars or witnesses to a historic moment. It forces the question that we only believe things are true when they conform to the world we expect to see. It implies that we wish the world of the past to be rendered in our own image, rather than doing the work to understand the story and the humanity of a subject who is somehow unclear to us. According to a 2017 article in The Guardian, Loughrey argued that “Black and white is so dismissive.” Loughrey’s inexcusable actions force us to realize that it is not the images’ color palette but the viewers' dismissiveness that causes the most harm.
Image credit: Barbed wire from the perimeter of the former S-21 Security Prison, now Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Pehn, Cambodia by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen 2005 (Wikimedia Commons | CC BY-SA 4.0).
