THERE HAS BEEN a recent rise in the popularity of colourised images. This has been particularly marked in Ireland: over the last two years, a raft of books of old colourised photographs has been published.
The pioneer of this genre was Old Ireland in Colour by John Breslin and Sarah-Anne Buckley. Conceived during lockdown, well-chosen images from Ireland of the late 19th century up to the 1940s were colourised using artificial intelligence (AI) software.
It aroused the nostalgia of the Irish public and sales of the book, which came out in autumn 2020, were phenomenal. It was a publishing sensation, generating sales of over €1m in the first year alone.
Colouring history
I had been producing illustrated books on the Irish revolutionary period for many years. I was in the course of preparing a book that covered the entire period, from the Easter Rising to the Civil War, when I spotted some newspaper articles on a young photographer who had colourised images of the Irish Civil War.
I contacted John O’Byrne in mid-2019 and we agreed to collaborate on a new book. An Illustrated History of the Irish Revolution was duly published to great acclaim. There were 850 illustrations, but key among these were around 100 which had been colourised by John.
The interesting thing about John’s technique is that he colourises the images by hand using Photoshop. This painstaking process takes a lot of time, but in our opinion, results in a richer, deeper and more accurate colourised image.
It is necessary to recognise that to some people, colourising historical black and white photos is anathema. I respect their views. However, colourisation is not new. The colour process has been around from the 1840s, when daguerreotypes were hand-coloured; indeed, one of the earliest colour photographic processes was invented in Dublin during the 1890s by John Joly.
In olden days, when the photographer pressed the shutter, they would have seen the people or scenes in the photograph in colour. Will the colourised photograph turn out to be an accurate depiction of the historical scene in question?
Even modern colour photographs, film or digital, cannot reproduce the exact colours as seen by the human eye. All printing, whether black-and-white or colour, is an interpretation of the contents of the original negative, plate or, in modern times, image file.
Colourisation is interpretive, but then so is practically everything about photography. Ultimately, one’s opinion on the process it is a matter of taste. As we have seen, colourised photographs have certainly won the approval of the Irish book-buying public.
Bringing the Civil War to life
As the centenary of the Irish Civil War approached, John and I decided to produce a book on that topic using colourised photographs. The intention was to tell the story of this complicated war in an accessible and understandable way.
So, we sourced images from 30 different entities; from large archives such as those of the National Library, through private collectors, to importantly, those kind individuals who gave us photographs of relatives who had participated in the Civil War.
With the colourisation exercise, John’s experience was hugely important as most of his work has focused on early 20th-century military photographs. He knows the military vehicles and their colours, as well as the detail of uniforms and emblems and the like.
And the results in the ensuing book have been exceptional. The colourised photos highlight the key events of the war, from the signing of the Treaty to the jostling between pro- and anti-Treaty sides over the first half of 1922; the bombardment of the Four Courts and the fighting in Dublin. The book covers the ensuing fighting in the countryside and the landings in Cork. The death of Collins was a seminal event.
The war became increasingly bitter and by the time Liam Lynch, IRA Chief-of-Staff, was shot on a bleak mountain in the Knockmealdowns, the anti-Treaty republicans had lost the war.
The colourisation brings all this to life in a vivid way. In addition it shows detail that would not previously have been noticed: for example, in the 1922 photo above of the young refugee from pogroms in Belfast, standing outside the Kildare Club (seized by the IRA to house refugees), and one can make out, amongst her pitiful belongings, the elaborate and colourful decorations of a small tea tin.
Many of the photographs enjoy a panoramic sweep, and this is accentuated by colour. For example the evocative image of anti-Treaty prisoners being escorted along the Cork quays in August 1922 – the colourisation allows the background and other features to be fully appreciated. In this image and many more, the colourisation brings the photographs from their original two dimensional form, to give a vibrant three dimensional experience.
So a book using colour which animates and brings to life the events of the Civil War, as well as providing nuanced captions which set out the story clearly.
What has been the critical and public reaction to all this? The Irish Civil War in Colour, since publication last September, has soared high on the bestselling charts. Ronan McCreevy in his review in the Irish Times commented that: “The result is a book full of startling images. It compels us to look again at the photographs we know well from the Civil War”.
The Irish Civil War in Colour is nominated in TheJournal.ie Best Irish Published Book of the Year category of the An Post Irish Book Awards – check out the awards website for the full list of nominees.
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