Marina Amaral: history in colour
Brazilian artist Marina Amaral colourises old black-and-white photographs, working from historical research.
What it is
Marina Amaral is a Brazilian artist and digital colourist who works with historical photographs. She takes black-and-white images from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and restores their colour, but not by guesswork: before she starts, she researches what the uniforms, fabrics, signs and everyday objects actually looked like. Her Instagram is a feed of these colourised photos, each with a detailed caption about the people in the frame.
Why we picked it
For Amaral colour isn't decoration or a filter. It removes the distance a black-and-white print puts between us and the past, so people from history books suddenly look like contemporaries. That's clearest in the carousels that set the original beside the colour version. The captions matter just as much: who is pictured, when and under what circumstances the photograph was taken.
A significant part of her work deals with the Second World War and the Holocaust, and it deserves to be viewed with care. In 2018, working with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, she colourised archival portraits of prisoners in a project called Faces of Auschwitz. The aim wasn't a striking image but a way to see individual people, with names and life stories, behind the statistics. With historian Dan Jones she has published several books, the first of which, "The Colour of Time", became a UK bestseller.
Where to start
- Before-and-after carousels that pair the original with the colour version.
- Portraits with long captions, the real heart of the account.
- Faces of Auschwitz, best taken slowly.
- Her books with Dan Jones: "The Colour of Time", "The World Aflame" and "A Woman's World".
Who it's for
Anyone interested in history and old photographs, history teachers looking for ways to bring the past closer to their students, and people curious about how photo colourisation works. Be aware that some of the material is difficult: these are documentary records of war.
Quick answers
Who is Marina Amaral? A Brazilian digital colourist who adds colour to historical photographs based on research into the original sources.
What books has she published? With historian Dan Jones: "The Colour of Time", "The World Aflame" and "A Woman's World".
What is Faces of Auschwitz? A 2018 project with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum presenting colourised portraits of camp prisoners alongside their stories.
