Any Colour You Like

Colourisation has come of age. Artists such as Wolfgang Wild and, in particular, Marina Amaral, whose book, The Colour of Time, is a bestseller, have used digital technology to ‘restore’ black and white images from the period 1850-1960, many of them well known and so all the more revelatory when unveiled.

A colourised image of Lewis Powell, for example, one of the aides of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, could be something out of a Burberry catalogue. Other photographs, such as that of Franz Ferdinand, the archduke whose murder sparked the First World War, tempt the viewer into hindsight, reading into his pale blue eyes the tragedy to come.