Originally posted by ramseybuckeye First of all how can colorizing be accurate unless someone was there and wrote down what every color was. A photographer like Matthew Brady did such powerful work it does not need to be colorized. My opinion is that colorizing trivializes the work. History should never be changed because of someone’s opinion, and to me these old photos are certainly history.
I think the color tinting of photos by the photographer or his assistants was fine because they intended to do that.
Ramsey, in the case of They Shall Not Grow Old, the purpose of the restorations was to provide context and perspective to modern generations who misinterpret black & white photography as "ancient history".
For fine art, clearly there is no reason to recolour black and white photographs because it destroys the artist's intent when they originally created the image with the palette in mind.
However, with historical documentarian photography (particularly war footage), artistic expression was probably not the focus of the photographer, and black and white film was likely not a choice of creativity as much as a practical necessity. Colourising and restoring this footage can be a valuable tool to provide education to future generations, so that history is not forgotten or trivialised, as the title of the film suggests. For this film in particular, Peter Jackson and his team have been using actual WW1 artifacts like uniforms and weapons, as reference to recreate the appearance and sound of the war as accurately as possible, it truly was an immense undertaking.
Of course, for archival purposes the original black and white negatives should be preserved and shared as well, but it isn't as effective at making the time period seem connected to our current reality.