Week 6: Hand tinting

Image of the week

Originally taken by Alexander Gardner, 1863

This confederate sharpshooter was killed in a trench during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863

Image digitally coloured by brazilian artist, Marina Amaral

Image Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4156812/Brazilian-artists-adds-colour-historic-photographs.html

I found this work on Facebook and i was always interested in hand tinted photographs so i went back to search for this artist and i unearthed her entire collection of digitally coloured photographs of these rich historical moments. Some may diss her for altering the photographs of historical moments but i feel that she gives a possibility of imagination to all these black and white photos. We now can relate how these people live in the past and what's it like, it's more accurate in that sense? Due to our relationship with colours, we can relate to what's in common between people in the past and now. How vibrant (in terms of colours) the culture were originally represented etc, because no one knows how's it like except for the photographer. Don't get me wrong i don't think that these digitally coloured photos are replacing or substituting the original but more like standing alongside or rather, complementing the originals WITH colours. Of course Amaral did a painstaking research on this before applying the stunning colours.

1855

Unidentified photographer, Portrait of a woman,1855 (?), October Daguerreotype, hand-tinted 2 x 1 5/8 ins

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1870s

Baron Raimund von Stillfried, [Chinese Gentleman], 1870s Albumen silver print, from glass negative, 23.7 x 19.1 cm (9 5/16 x 7 1/2 ins)

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1900

Kusakabe Kimbei, 16. Wind Costume, 1900 (ca) Studio portrait, hand tinted

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1930

Unidentified photographer, Maharaja Swarup Singh of Udaipur, 1930 (ca) Albumen print, with watercolour 28 x 22 cm (11 x 8.5 ins)

Interest in the hand coloured photographs of the Indian sub-continent has been increasing since 2000 with a number of exhibitions and books.

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1960s

Saul Leiter, Untitled [Painted nudes], 1960s (late)- 1990s (early)

Gelatin silver print, painted with gouache, casein, watercolour, or a combination, 20 x 26 cm

Saul Leiter died in 2013 and a book was published two years later that showed his painted nudes for the first time. Known as a street photographer and an early adopter of colour he had started out as a painter and had one of his works in the group show Abstract and Surrealist American Art at the in 1947. Using his gelatin silver printstaken from as early as the 1940s he painted over them using colour palettes that would have suited Gustav Klimt(1862-1918). Dating these prints is difficult but they appear to have been painted between the late 1960s and the early 1990s.

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1989

18.1.89, 10 cm x 15 cm

Oil on colour photograph

Gerhard Richter has often explored the border between painting and photography in his art, but his series of overpaintedphotographs has been largely overlooked until recently. In many ways, the project is a combination of the impulse for economy/reuse with Richter’s artistic vision.

What emerges from this process are strange hybrid works, often spectacular in their contrasts. The most noticeable effect is that the colored swaths of paint conceal parts of the underlying photograph, leading the viewer to struggle to fill in the pieces of the figurative story, creating a sense of mystery or unknown. The abstract smears and ripples of color themselves have a beauty of their own, richly textured and swirled surfaces highlighting the “painterly” qualities of the medium. These two forces are then juxtaposed in each picture, with complementary or contradictory color schemes in the two layers creating additional visual excitement.

Source: https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/art/overpainted-photographs/people-74/18189-13411?&categoryid=74&p=1&sp=32&tab=notes-tabs

https://collectordaily.com/book-gerhard-richter-overpainted-photographs/