Book review: The Colour of Time - a pictorial history of global conflict
The World Aflame, by Marina Amaral and Dan Jones
Reviewed by by Sam Wollaston
She starts by sourcing black and white photos: George V on horseback; the young Winston Churchill, fresh-faced and confident; momentous events – life in the trenches, the Christmas truce; suffrage and suffering; the Great Depression, famine, fascism, Hitler and Mussolini; more war, genocide and destruction, the atom bomb, liberation; a little bit of love as well. And she colours them, digitally.
Julián Casanova - The Spanish Civil War, 80 years after
The Red Army, Berlin battleground - 70 years later. Photos from then and now
Reviewed by by Sam Wollaston
She starts by sourcing black and white photos: George V on horseback; the young Winston Churchill, fresh-faced and confident; momentous events – life in the trenches, the Christmas truce; suffrage and suffering; the Great Depression, famine, fascism, Hitler and Mussolini; more war, genocide and destruction, the atom bomb, liberation; a little bit of love as well. And she colours them, digitally.
A young refugee shelters in a church in
Barcelona in 1939, after her home in Madrid was bombed during the Spanish civil war: Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
We’ll come back to the
process. But first, while we’re talking about modern-day resonance, Amaral says
the recent rise of populism and the far right in many countries (not least her
own) is part of what motivates her work. The warning signs are there, she says.
“You read some of the things people were saying then, and you can find people
saying the exact same thing today.”
5th London Rifle Brigade soldiers with
German Saxon regimental troops during the Christmas truce in 1914:
Popperfoto/Getty Images
In her homeland, run
by far-right president Jair Bolsonaro,
the then culture minister Roberto Alvim recently borrowed heavily from Joseph
Goebbels, the Nazi minister for propaganda during the second world war, in a speech: “Brazilian art in the next decade will be
heroic and national, he said, as Wagner played in the background (he was later
sacked).
“Things like that
motivate me to keep doing my job,” Amaral says. “It’s why I believe in the
value and importance of colourising photos. Only when people really understand
what happened, and why, will they be able to do something, to not let those
moments or those radical people rise again and transform the world into
something ugly and unbearable.”...
Julián Casanova - The Spanish Civil War, 80 years after
The Red Army, Berlin battleground - 70 years later. Photos from then and now
