It has always been accepted wisdom in writing about photography that black and white was somehow more gritty, more realistic, more serious in presenting news and reality, and I’ve never been entirely convinced. With almost all the news appearing in colour for some years now, it has long been clear that this particular cultural conditioning is losing, perhaps has completely lost it’s grip on us.
A week ago, Swedish artist Sanna Dullaway posted a message (as MyGrapeFruit) on Reddit “For my second cakeday I thought I’d show my best colourizations and some restorations that I’ve been doing for fun. Hope you enjoy!” which linked (and still does) to a photo album on photo-sharing site Imgur, although since then her pairs of vintage black and white images – including such truly iconic photographs such as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother and Timothy O’Sullivan’s Harvest of Death, as well as others clearly still copyright – have been copied to more blogs than I knew existed.
On her web site and her DeviantArt page you can read a statement from her about the copyright problems involved in some of the pictures. In part she says
“Ignorance is not an excuse and I (now) know some of the photos are not public domain but copyrighted. Please note I do not take credit for the iconic photos I colourized, only the actual colouring.”
Later she makes clear:
‘I did not want to “improve” nor “replace” the photos I DID colourize as some of you may think. I just wanted to show you a new perspective of the black & white old world, it used to be in colour, too. I thought famous photos would touch most hearts. Focus on the photos, not me.’
Of course copyright is important, and I try carefully to respect it here both for words and pictures. Her ignorance is not unusual for internet users or bloggers, but perhaps surprising for someone who is setting up in business as a restorer and colouriser of black and white images. That she is using other people’s copyright images and gaining publicity for a business she is setting up makes her offence more serious. I don’t agree with those who suggest it is “sacrilege” to colour photographs such as Eddie Adams’s 1968 Saigon Execution picture, but it does certainly offend against his moral rights and copyright. As Adams himself died in 2004 we can’t know what he would have thought of it.
Personally I think it is sensitively done and don’t find it offensive, but it isn’t my picture. But on several occasions artists have asked to use my images in various ways as a basis for their work. The vital difference is of course that they asked – and paid.
What do I think about them? Some perhaps don’t quite ring true; that Migrant Mother for example perhaps looks just a little too healthy and well-fed in colour, but many I think are improvements on the black and white original. Of course we can’t know how true they were to the actual scene that was photographed, and one problem with working with colour is that there are often very distracting elements in a scene.
Margaret Bourke-White’s 1937 ‘The American Way’ (see it at Life too, where it is shown more dramatically) completely changes its dynamics. In the original, the dark and sombre line of flood victims dominate the light greys of the background billboard, reality against dream, while in the coloured version the bright tones of the poster overpower the dull line. And in reality, someone might just have been wearing a bright red jacket or tie, which would have rather changed the picture.
Now we have colour, and most of the time it makes sense to use it. But a few things perhaps still look better in black and white, and it can certainly simplify some images. What I find rather silly and sometimes very annoying are some photographers who have never learnt to use black and white who shoot in colour and then routinely (and usually poorly) convert the pictures to black and white thinking that it makes their work more serious as photojournalism.