The art of hand-col­or­ing or tint­ing black and white pho­tographs has been around, the Vox video above explains, since the ear­li­est days of pho­tog­ra­phy itself. “But these didn’t end up look­ing super real­is­tic,” at least not next to their mod­ern coun­ter­parts, cre­at­ed with com­put­ers. Dig­i­tal col­oriza­tion “has made it pos­si­ble for artists to recon­struct images with far more accu­ra­cy.”

Accu­ra­cy, you say? How is it pos­si­ble to recon­struct col­or arrange­ments from the past when they have only been pre­served in black and white? Well, this requires research. “You now have a wealth of infor­ma­tion,” says Jor­dan Lloyd, a mas­ter dig­i­tal col­orist. “It’s just know­ing where to look.”

His­tor­i­cal adver­tise­ments, diaries, doc­u­ments, and the assess­ments of his­to­ri­ans and ethno­g­ra­phers, among oth­er resources, pro­vide enough data for a real­is­tic approx­i­ma­tion. Some con­jec­ture is involved, but when you see the amount of research that goes into deter­min­ing the col­ors of the past, you will most sure­ly be impressed.

This isn’t play­ing with fil­ters and set­tings in Pho­to­shop until the images look good—it’s using soft­ware to recre­ate what schol­ar­ship uncov­ers, the kind of dig­ging that turns up impor­tant his­tor­i­cal facts such as the orig­i­nal red-on-black logo of 7Up, or the fact that the Eif­fel tow­er was paint­ed a col­or called “Venet­ian red” dur­ing its con­struc­tion.

Unless we know this col­or his­to­ry, we might be inclined to think col­orized pho­tographs that get it right are wrong. How­ev­er, the aim of mod­ern col­oriz­ers is not only to make the past seem more imme­di­ate to us in the present; they also attempt to restore the col­ors peo­ple saw when pho­tographs from the 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­turies were tak­en.

The soft­ware may not dic­tate col­or, but it still plays an indis­pens­able role in how alive dig­i­tal­ly col­orized pho­tographs appear. Col­oriz­ers first use it to remove blem­ish­es, scratch­es, and the signs of age. Then they blend hun­dreds of lay­ers of col­ors. It’s a lit­tle like mak­ing a dig­i­tal oil paint­ing. Human skin can have up to 20 lay­ers of col­ors, rang­ing from pinks, to yel­lows, to blues.

With­out “an intu­itive under­stand­ing of how light works in the atmos­phere,” how­ev­er, these artists would fail to per­suade us. Col­or is pro­duced by light, as we know, and light is con­di­tioned by lev­els of arti­fi­cial and nat­ur­al light blend­ing in a space, by atmos­pher­ic con­di­tions and time of day. Dif­fer­ent sur­faces reflect light dif­fer­ent­ly. Cor­rect­ly inter­pret­ing these con­di­tions in a mono­chro­mat­ic pho­to­graph is the key to “achiev­ing pho­to­re­al­ism.”

Crit­ics of col­oriza­tion treat it like a form of van­dal­ism, but as Lloyd points out, the process is not meant to sub­sti­tute for the orig­i­nal arti­facts, but to sup­ple­ment them. The col­orized pho­tos we see in the video and at the links below are of images in the pub­lic domain, avail­able to use and reuse for any pur­pose. Col­oriza­tion artists have found their pur­pose in mak­ing the past seem far less like a dis­tant coun­try.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Russ­ian His­to­ry & Lit­er­a­ture Come to Life in Won­der­ful­ly Col­orized Por­traits: See Pho­tos of Tol­stoy, Chekhov, the Romanovs & More

Col­orized Pho­tos Bring Walt Whit­man, Char­lie Chap­lin, Helen Keller & Mark Twain Back to Life

The Open­ing of King Tut’s Tomb, Shown in Stun­ning Col­orized Pho­tos (1923–5)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When we visu­al­ize the Great Depres­sion, we think first of one woman: Native Amer­i­can migrant work­er Flo­rence Owens Thomp­son. Few of us know her name, though near­ly all of us know her face. For that we have anoth­er woman to thank: the pho­tog­ra­ph­er Dorothea Lange who dur­ing the Depres­sion was work­ing for the Unit­ed States fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, specif­i­cal­ly the Farm Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion, on “a project that would involve doc­u­ment­ing poor rur­al work­ers in a pro­pa­gan­da effort to elic­it polit­i­cal sup­port for gov­ern­ment aid.”

That’s how Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, puts it in a video essay on Lange’s famous 1936 pho­to of Thomp­son, Migrant Moth­er. (For best results, view the video below on a phone or tablet rather than on a stan­dard com­put­er screen.) Reach­ing the migrant work­ers’ camp in Nipo­mo, Cal­i­for­nia where Thomp­son and her chil­dren were stay­ing toward the end of anoth­er long day of pho­tog­ra­phy, Lange at first passed it by.

Only about twen­ty miles lat­er did she decide to turn the car around and see what mate­r­i­al the 2,500 to 3,500 “pea pick­ers” there might offer. She stayed only ten min­utes, but in that time cap­tured what Puschak calls the pho­to­graph that “came to define the Depres­sion in the Amer­i­can con­scious­ness” — it even heads the Great Depres­sion’s Wikipedia page — and “became the arche­typ­al image of strug­gling fam­i­lies in any era.”

Over time, Migrant Moth­er has also become “one of the most icon­ic pic­tures in the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy.” But Lange did­n’t get it right away: it was actu­al­ly the sixth por­trait she took of Thomp­son, each one more pow­er­ful (and more able to “evoke sym­pa­thy from vot­ers that would trans­late into polit­i­cal sup­port”) than the last. Puschak takes us through each of these, mark­ing the changes in com­po­si­tion that led to the pho­to­graph we can all call to mind imme­di­ate­ly. “A less­er pho­tog­ra­ph­er would have milked the chil­dren’s faces for their sym­pa­thet­ic poten­tial,” for instance, but hav­ing them turn away “com­mu­ni­cates that mes­sage of fam­i­ly” with­out “tak­ing away from the cen­tral face, or the eyes, which seem at last to let down their guard as they search the dis­tance and wor­ry.”

These and oth­er active­ly made choic­es (includ­ing the removal of Thomp­son’s dis­tract­ing left thumb in the dark­room) mean that “there is very lit­tle spon­ta­neous in this icon­ic image of so-called doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy,” but “whether that dimin­ish­es its pow­er is up to you. For me, being able to actu­al­ly see the steps of Lange’s craft enhances her work.” What­ev­er Lange’s process, the prod­uct defined an era, and upon pub­li­ca­tion con­vinced the gov­ern­ment to send 20,000 pounds of food to Nipo­mo — though by that point Thomp­son her­self, who ulti­mate­ly suc­ceed­ed in pro­vid­ing for her fam­i­ly and lived to the age of 80, had moved on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

478 Dorothea Lange Pho­tographs Poignant­ly Doc­u­ment the Intern­ment of the Japan­ese Dur­ing WWII

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Clem Albers & Fran­cis Stewart’s Cen­sored Pho­tographs of a WWII Japan­ese Intern­ment Camp

Found: Lost Great Depres­sion Pho­tos Cap­tur­ing Hard Times on Farms, and in Town

The Cap­ti­vat­ing Sto­ry Behind the Mak­ing of Ansel Adams’ Most Famous Pho­to­graph, Moon­rise, Her­nan­dez, New Mex­i­co

“A Great Day in Harlem,” Art Kane’s Icon­ic Pho­to of 57 Jazz Leg­ends, Cel­e­brates Its 60th Anniver­sary

Edward Hopper’s Icon­ic Paint­ing Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Ansel Adams cap­tured many an Amer­i­can land­scape as no pho­tog­ra­ph­er had before or has since, but in his large cat­a­log you’ll find few pic­tures as imme­di­ate­ly strik­ing as — and none more famous than — Moon­rise, Her­nan­dez, New Mex­i­co. Orig­i­nal­ly tak­en from the shoul­der of a high­way pass­ing through the com­mu­ni­ty of Her­nan­dez in 1941, the shot cap­tures the moon ris­ing above a clus­ter of hous­es, a church with a grave­yard, and a moun­tain range in the back­ground. All of those might seem like pret­ty stan­dard ele­ments of a remote part of Amer­i­ca in that era, but the sheer visu­al impact Adams draws from them shows what sep­a­rates a road-trip snap­shot from the work of a ded­i­cat­ed pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

Few pho­tog­ra­phers in the his­to­ry of the medi­um have been quite as ded­i­cat­ed as Adams, whose tech­niques we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. But as much as his delib­er­ate­ness and patience have become the stuff of pho­to­graph­ic leg­end, Moon­rise was very much a seat-of-the-pants achieve­ment.

Adams was dri­ving around the west with his son Michael and friend Cedric Wright at the behest of Sec­re­tary of the Inte­ri­or Harold Ick­es, who had com­mis­sioned Adams to pro­duce large-for­mat pho­tographs for the Depart­ment of the Inte­ri­or’s new muse­um. Toward the end of one not par­tic­u­lar­ly pro­duc­tive day on the job came the big moment. As Adams him­self tells it in Exam­ples: The Mak­ing of Forty Pho­tographs:

We were sail­ing south­ward along the high­way not far from Espanola when I glanced to the left and saw an extra­or­di­nary sit­u­a­tion — an inevitable pho­to­graph! I almost ditched the car and rushed to set up my 8×10 cam­era. I was yelling to my com­pan­ions to bring me things from the car as I strug­gled to change com­po­nents on my Cooke Triple-Con­vert­ible lens. I had a clear visu­al­iza­tion of the image I want­ed, but when the Wrat­ten No. 15 (G) fil­ter and the film hold­er were in place, I could not find my West­on expo­sure meter! The sit­u­a­tion was des­per­ate: the low sun was trail­ing the edge of the clouds in the west, and shad­ow would soon dim the white cross­es.

While an expe­ri­enced pho­tog­ra­ph­er today prob­a­bly won’t have used the same gear as Adams, they’ll cer­tain­ly rec­og­nize the dread­ful feel­ing of being about to lose a pre­cious image. What came to the res­cue of Moon­rise was­n’t any piece of Adams’ equip­ment — he nev­er did find that light meter — but the fact that he’d already spent so much time immersed so deeply in the prac­tice of pho­tog­ra­phy that he could set up and load his cam­era as if by pure instinct. Then, when he remem­bered that he knew the lumi­nos­i­ty of the moon (250 foot can­dles, for the record), he could cal­cu­late the prop­er expo­sure for the image he’d already visu­al­ized in his head: one with a bright moon and just enough light on the ground to make the cross­es in the church­yard glow.

You can learn more about the mak­ing and nature of Adams’ best-known pho­to­graph, prints of which com­mand high prices at auc­tion to this day, in the three videos here: first Adams’ own descrip­tion of his process mak­ing it, then a short by the Ansel Adams Gallery exam­in­ing a rare “mur­al-sized” print from the ear­ly 1970s, then a look into the pic­ture’s back­sto­ry by Swann Auc­tion Gal­leries. The tale of the pic­ture’s tak­ing, dra­mat­ic though it is, does­n’t quite con­vey the full extent of the pho­to­graph­ic work it took to cre­ate the image known to every­one famil­iar with Adams’ work (and many who aren’t famil­iar with it): he also had to go through quite a bit of tri­al and error in the devel­op­ment process to imbue the sky with just the right dark­ness. If any pho­tog­ra­ph­er could pro­duce Moon­rise, Her­nan­dez, New Mex­i­co, Ansel Adams could. But we might reflect on the fact that even a mas­ter like Ansel Adams only had one Moon­rise, Her­nan­dez, New Mex­i­co in his career — and even he almost missed it.

via Petapix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

226 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs of Great Amer­i­can Nation­al Parks Are Now Online

How to Take Pho­tographs Like Ansel Adams: The Mas­ter Explains The Art of “Visu­al­iza­tion”

200 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs Expose the Rig­ors of Life in Japan­ese Intern­ment Camps Dur­ing WW II

Ansel Adams, Pho­tog­ra­ph­er: 1958 Doc­u­men­tary Cap­tures the Cre­ative Process of the Icon­ic Amer­i­can Pho­tog­ra­ph­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.