I am not a fan of colorized imagery.
If you want to call it “art” (with a little “a”) feel free. Teddy Turner fought that battle for a lot of years and lost.
It is an artifice.
Sure, it would be nice to see what those days looked like in “living” color. But anything that is added to those images is pure conjecture on the part of the “artist.”
I have the colors in my mind, and I am certain you have yours in yours.
The colorized version got a fair number of “likes.” Fine. If you like this sort of thing. But there are two significant failings in that version. The first, upon which I will elaborate below, is the most significant reason for not doing this. The focus of the photograph—Vraciu’s toothy grin—is completely lost.
Lost? How can I say that? It is right there. Sure, but look at other values of brightness of equal or greater impact. Instead of focusing on the grin, the eye spreads around the image, giving equal or more weight to other, less significant areas. The “world is flat” theory.
The second is an obviously induced historical inaccuracy. This is something of which colorizers must be wary.
See that touch of red band of the insignia touching the chin of the central sailor? It is pretty inconspicuous, but telling. That red border (and it is missing from the rest of the insignia) was only authorized on U.S. military aircraft for basically six weeks in 1943, from 28 June through 14 August. While not all insignia were repainted immediately, thus appearing on aircraft for several months thereafter, this photograph was taken nearly a year later. This red should be blue.
Was that the only historical error the colorist introduced?
The bottom line is that colorization is very much akin to adding changes to passages in Moby Dick and republishing the novel without special notation. It is not what the author intended.
You might argue that the photographer, in real time, saw color and wanted to photograph that but could not because he did not have the proper film. That argument is invalid for a number of reasons. Color imaging material was available in World War I, indeed color photography first surfaced in 1855, within 20 years of the birth of the medium.
More to the point, however, is the purpose of the photography and the requirements of the job. Then, what were the limitations put on the photographer by “management?” For the Vraciu photograph, the photographer had color film available. Why did he chose black-and-white? This far removed we can only guess what the standard operating procedures were. My guess is two factors played into the choice: expediency and wide-spread distribution. The b&w process was quick and its results could be rapidly reproduced and disseminated. Color was problematic at all those points.
In the early 1970s, newspapers were just beginning to use color more frequently. The process had been developed years before and was widely used in magazines, but even there, only on a limited basis. It was an expensive process. A color page required four passes through the printing press—one for each color of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Each required its own printing plates and ink setup. Getting all four into alignment of 1/120th of an inch, meant there was a lot of wastage. Usually four-color images were only used in advertising, because the advertiser paid the cost. It wasn’t that way with news imagery. The paper bore the cost of that from its profits. Thus it was used sparingly.
But in the 70s, newspapers were competing with television news and the American viewership was beginning to see everything in “living compatible color.” (There is another whole story about that word “compatible.” We never knew how bad we had it.) So papers had to bite the bullet and compete.
Still, we photographers were limited by the assignment and/or page positioning. Page 1, Metro/City front pages, and sports front pages all got the color treatment. Stories relegated to the inside were condemned to black-and-white.
Over the course of nearly 40 years of newspaper photography, I have hundreds of thousands of black-and-white negatives in my files, and (pre-digital) significantly fewer than a tenth of that number in color.
My best photographs exist only in black-and-white. I do not wish to see any of them in color.
There are two very simple reasons, and they are interrelated. Black-and-white is a very objective medium. Color is not. People have predelections for colors. Humans react to color in very unpredictable manners. Some like blue, some don’t like green, some are ambivalent to yellow. Many hate red because of its resonance with blood. All this is subjective. Insert color into an image and you insert uncertainty. Among viewers there is no common predictable reaction to an image. This obscures the photographer’s communication.
Photographers have absolutely no control over the colors in an image, thus they cede a significant portion of their communication to the whims of the observer.
Black-and-white, however, has no similar baggage to overcome. The photographer, with his control over light and shadow, can get the viewer—all viewers—to the point of the image. We practiced this direction in the darkroom through the techniques of burning (adding more light) and dodging (removing light) from the printed image.
The human eye goes to light. A flash goes off, everyone turns to see the source. A light burns out, and unless it is the only one on in a room, no one notices.
In the darkroom, the photographer could and would de-emphasize certain portions of the image by burning, which had the effect of making that area darker. Conversely, he emphasized portions by dodging, making them lighter.
This pair of photos shows the not-so-subtle use of the “Hand of God.” The top is as published, the other has been deliberately darkened to emphasize how the photographer directed the viewer to the message—Rodney Marsh’s impish grin.
A skilled photographer—indeed the best in the world—crafted black-and-white images that could be read literally like a book. That is why they are the masters, even the most visually illiterate understand the point of the photograph.
The point here, especially as it relates to recent overload of colorized imagery particularly from World Wars I and II, is that by adding color the “artist” is adding subjectivity.
Realize that that color addition is just one person’s take on the actual colors; was it really that blue? something lighter? something darker? something a tad more green? yellow? red? mauve? puce? or a billion other colors, shades, intensities, brilliance, and more. And that is just one color in their addition to the photographer’s work.
What is lost is the photographer’s objective message.
Now don’t go splitting hairs on this. You will immediately observe that burning and dodging are subjective actions in their own. Aha! True! However, they are the photographer’s subjective insertions—the person who created the image. There is no subjectivity in that. The image as presented is what he wants you to see. It is his communication. Look at this, don’t look at that.
How can someone literally generations removed from a subject have the audacity to state this is what the photographer did or did not want you to see?
Again, just adjusting values, gave this result.
And more magenta images cleaned up . . .
And sometimes an image goes green, but that can be cleaned up as well.
I am working on a book with Bob Sumrall and this photograph is one we intend to use. There is, however, no caption information.
