The Color of Truth

Rethinking Photographic Evidence: Color, Truth, and the Accessibility of the Past

The debate over colorizing historical photographs has largely been framed as a binary choice between preservation and manipulation, between archival purity and popular accessibility.

This framing is intellectually lazy. It presumes that the monochrome photograph represents an unmediated historical truth, while colorization constitutes a form of historical tampering.

Both premises are false.

I will argue that colorization, properly understood, does not compromise photographic evidence but rather restores dimensions of historical reality that monochrome photography necessarily excludes. Further, I contend that the resistance to colorization reveals more about contemporary anxieties regarding technological mediation than about any genuine commitment to historical accuracy. By examining the intersection of color photography's technical development with the career of Louis Comfort Tiffany—an artist whose life's work centered on color and light—I demonstrate that colorization can function as historical interpretation rather than historical distortion.

The Myth of Photographic Objectivity

Historians who clutch their pearls at the prospect of colorization operate under a persistent fiction: that the original photograph captures unmediated truth. This position ignores over a century of scholarship on photography's constructed nature, from Walter Benjamin's observations on mechanical reproduction to more recent work in visual culture studies on the photograph as ideological apparatus.[1]

Every photograph is already a manipulation. The choice of exposure, the chemical processes of development, the degradation of paper stock, the translation through halftone printing—each step introduces alterations. A badly printed newspaper portrait of Tiffany, where halftone dots have consumed facial features and contrast has collapsed into murky gray, preserves almost nothing of evidentiary value. What remains is not "truth" but rather the accumulated failures of reproductive technology.

To insist on the sanctity of such an image is to fetishize decay itself.

What We Lose, What We Gain: A Material Analysis

Consider the practical reality. When working with a severely degraded newspaper reproduction—the kind where facial features have merged into shadow and texture has vanished into grain—what precisely do we risk losing through careful colorization? The answer is: virtually nothing of evidentiary significance, because almost everything was already lost in the original reproduction process.

What we gain, however, is substantial. We restore dimensional information that allows contemporary viewers to apprehend the subject as a human being rather than as an artifact. This is not sentimentalism; it is phenomenology. The addition of skin tone, eye color, and the warmth of textiles reestablishes the perceptual conditions under which the subject actually existed in the world.

For Tiffany specifically, this restoration carries particular historical resonance. His entire artistic practice centered on the manipulation of colored light through glass. To present him solely through the monochrome lens is to strip away the very element that defined his aesthetic vision and material production.

The Autochrome Moment: Color, Glass, and Historical Irony

The historical irony becomes more acute when we consider the timeline. The Lumière brothers patented the Autochrome color photography process in 1903 and released it commercially in 1907—precisely during Tiffany's most productive period.[2] The Autochrome utilized microscopic grains of potato starch, dyed red, green, and blue, and distributed across glass plates to capture color images.

Glass. Color. Light filtered through a medium to capture reality.

An example of early 1900s Autochrome process.

This was not merely analogous to Tiffany's work with art glass—it was structurally identical in its fundamental concerns. Both practices grappled with how to capture and preserve the chromatic dimensions of visual experience through glass-based media. As I have discussed with Eric Taubman at Penumbra Foundation, which houses an extraordinary collection of these early Autochrome plates, the material connection between Tiffany's artistic experiments and contemporary color photography experiments was not coincidental but constitutive of a broader cultural moment's preoccupation with color fidelity.[3]

It is inconceivable that Tiffany, obsessed as he was with chromatic innovation, remained unaware of or uninterested in the Autochrome. His peers and contemporaries were actively experimenting with this technology, wrestling with the same question that animated his art: how do we preserve color as we experience it? Yet here we are, over a century later, with scholars insisting that maintaining Tiffany's image in monochrome somehow preserves historical integrity.The position is not merely conservative—it is historically incoherent.

The Politics of Technological Change

Resistance to colorization echoes earlier moral panics over technological innovation in visual media. When synchronized sound came to cinema, critics declared it vulgar, insisting that "true" cinema was silent—despite the obvious fact that actors had always spoken and that silence was merely a technological limitation, not an aesthetic choice.[4] Similarly, early color film faced fierce resistance from purists who had convinced themselves that black-and-white cinematography represented cinema's essential nature.

In each case, what was presented as a defense of authenticity was actually a defense of technological limitation masquerading as aesthetic principle. The world has always been in color. The world has always had sound. Our inability to capture these dimensions did not make their absence more "true"—it simply made our technologies inadequate to the task of representation.

The same logic applies to historical photography. Monochrome is not more authentic; it is simply less complete.

The Human Dimension: Race, Identity, and Chromatic Erasure

The stakes of this debate extend beyond aesthetics into the realm of human representation and identity. Black-and-white photography does not simply remove color—it systematically erases crucial markers of human diversity and individuality.

Human beings exist in millions of color variations. A person of European descent might possess ruddy, pinkish skin and green eyes. A person of African descent might have deep brown skin with warm amber undertones and rich brown eyes. In monochrome photography, this extraordinary chromatic diversity collapses into a narrow tonal range, flattening human difference into gradations of gray.

The political dimensions of this flattening deserve more attention than they have received. For subjects with darker complexions, monochrome photography can cause facial features to merge with shadows, diminishing the directness of their gaze and their visual presence in the frame. The eyes—those proverbial windows to the soul—recede into the overall tonality of the image.

Colorization restores what should never have been taken away. The warmth of skin becomes visible. The whites of the eyes regain their subtle variations—cream, ivory, the slight pink that makes the iris distinct. Brown eyes acquire depth and catch light with specificity. The person in the photograph becomes present rather than past, immediate rather than distant.

This is not artifice. This is restoration of human dimension.

Pedagogy and the Instagram Generation

We must also confront the pedagogical implications of our choices about how we present the past. In an era of rapid digital scrolling, younger viewers—adolescents with no lived memory of analog photography—do not pause for faded, degraded monochrome images. They lack the interpretive frameworks that trained historians bring to archival materials. They have not been taught to "see past" deterioration.

I have witnessed this firsthand in the classroom. Students encountering badly degraded historical photographs have asked, with genuine confusion: "How did they create that effect?" They perceived the damage as intentional aesthetic filtering rather than as the unintentional result of time and poor reproduction.

To them, degradation reads as artifice. The "authentic" past looks fake.

Louis Comfort Tiffany

Mindful reconstruction with use of color

Present those same students with a carefully colorized version that restores dimensional information and human presence, and they stop scrolling. They look. They ask questions. They connect with the subject as a person rather than as a historical abstraction.

This is not pandering to short attention spans—it is recognizing that engagement is the precondition for education. A photograph that no one examines preserves nothing. A photograph that arrests attention and provokes inquiry has accomplished something meaningful.

The Instability of “Original"

There is a final point worth considering: the concept of the "original" photograph is itself far less stable than archival discourse typically acknowledges. Juan Montes, one of my photographic forebears, documented Indigenous peoples in northwestern Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Every print made from his negatives was different. Chemistry varied. Paper quality differed. Exposure times fluctuated. Development processes were inconsistent.

So which print represents the "original"? The first one struck from the negative? The best preserved example? The one that happened to survive into our archives?

The notion that there exists a single, authoritative version of any historical photograph is a convenient fiction that serves institutional needs for classification and control. But it does not reflect the material reality of photographic production.

Conclusion: Toward a More Honest Historicism

I am not advocating for the indiscriminate colorization of all historical photographs. The European black-and-white tradition—the work of photographers like August Sander, the Bechers, and others—retains profound aesthetic and documentary power. Monochrome photography, when deliberately chosen rather than technologically imposed, can reveal truths that color might obscure.

But we must distinguish between limitation and choice, between technological inadequacy and aesthetic intention. And we must be honest about what we are doing when we insist on presenting the past exclusively through degraded monochrome reproductions.

We are not preserving truth. We are preserving a particular relationship to the past—one that maintains distance, that emphasizes pastness itself, that keeps historical subjects safely contained within their moment rather than allowing them to become present to us.

Colorization, done thoughtfully and with historical rigor, offers an alternative. It does not erase the original; rather, it adds a layer of interpretation, much as translation adds interpretive layers to a text. It makes the past more accessible without making it less complex. It honors subjects like Tiffany by representing them in the chromatic dimensions that mattered to them.

The real manipulation is not colorization. The real manipulation is pretending there is only one right way to see the past—and that this way happens to coincide precisely with the limitations of century-old technology.

Perhaps we should be more suspicious of our own investments in those limitations.

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Notes

[1] Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935); Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (MIT Press, 1997); Martha Rosler, "In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography)," in Decoys and Disruptions (MIT Press, 2004).

[2] For technical details on the Autochrome process, see Alison Nordström, "Truth, Beauty, and the Autochrome," in Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, ed. J.J. Long, Andrea Noble, and Edward Welch (Routledge, 2009).

[3] Personal conversation, Penumbra Foundation, 2024. The Foundation's collection includes approximately 200 Autochrome plates from 1907-1935.

[4] See Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (University of California Press, 1997).