Book review: The Colour of Time - a pictorial history of global conflict

By Dilip -
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.
A young refugee shelters in a church in Barcelona in 1939, after her home in Madrid was bombed during the Spanish civil war: black and white image coloured by artist Marina Amaral
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 at Ploegsteert Wood, on the western front, during the Christmas truce in 1914: black and white image coloured by artist Marina Amaral
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.”...
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/may/09/colour-allows-us-to-understand-in-a-deeper-sense-hitler-churchill-and-others-in-a-new-light

The Christmas truce, 1914 - Steven Johns
Julián Casanova - The Spanish Civil War, 80 years after
The Red Army,  Berlin battleground - 70 years later. Photos from then and now
Vietnam's anti-war exhibition brings GIs and Viet Cong together. By Hannah Ellis-Petersen
Evelyn Theiss - The Photos That Caused Americans To Ask ‘What Are We Doing In Vietnam?’ The My Lai Massacre 50 years later
Remembering the Fall of Saigon, 45 years on
An era passes: legendary Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap Dies at 102

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