The hand-coloured photographs from Japan

[mooseontheloose]

I really enjoy the Darkroom series produced by Vox, and I found their latest one on 19th-century hand-painted photographs to be really interesting. Made me realize that I should explore this a bit more, especially since I live here!

 

[pentaxuser]

Interesting, thanks. some of those were real works of art. Professional hand-coloured photos were popular throughout the 50s in the U.K. especially portraits and a studio such as the one owned by Chambre Hardman in Liverpool had a small army of colourists( nearly 100% female and working for next to nothing) dotted around the city whereby a b&w portraitiwas taken one day processed and printed the same day then sent out to a colourist the next morning and might even have been collected the same day then framed if required. So maybe as little as 2 days between taking and handing over to the customer

I suspect that production of colour photos in this way was, at the time, cheaper and more reliable than an actual colour neg and print.

pentaxuser

 

[halfaman]

I saw a similar video of a southamerican craftsman, the last of its kind, that retouched and put color on B/W prints by hand. They were 100% potraits and I remember the result was more near to painting than to photography.

 

[Vaughn]

Interesting that the Japanese handcoloring was heavily influenced by the existing art of coloring woodblock prints. The same was happening at Europe at the time, but seems to be influenced more by painting. Perhaps to Westerners, imitating painting was of greater import, than to use transparent watercolors.

I have a couple of hand-colored photographs by Wallace Nutting ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Nutting ) that I grew up with -- definitely in the Western style of turning a photograph into a painting. Very popular as wedding presents -- he had a 'factory' pumping them out.

 

[Dan Pavel]

Thanks for sharing!