Past caring: archive, affect, and whiteness in digital colourisation

Abstract

The digital colourisation of historical photographs has received prominent and favourable media attention since the 2010s; several museums, heritage organisations, and publishers have adopted it. In the US and British contexts, both the selection of images to colourise and the ways in which their colourisation is discussed point to the overlooked but significant role the process plays in reinforcing racial identities and extending historical biases into the present. By examining the work of high-profile colourisers and the presentation of colourised photographs in social and traditional media, I argue that digital colourisation is a form of ‘white sight’ which sustains whiteness and its attendant powers. Operating at the intersection of a visual economy and an affective one, digitally colourised photographs generate an emotional response and foster a collective identity geared towards whiteness. In this article, I attend to the impact of digitisation on historical photographs, the sources and subject matter of digitally colourised photographs, and the language used to discuss them, in order to reveal the structures of racial and gender bias underneath–and challenge assertions that colourisation is a form of caring for the past.