“Black and White” as authentic?!
The fascination with black and white images is not common only to historians. Just try to make an experiment: turn a colored photo into a black and white image, and ask somebody, which is the image with the most historical feeling. Additionally, black and white movies are still regarded as more serious than their colored equivalents.
Some film directors are still using the effects of black and white images to make their message more clear. To a certain extent, it is possible to assert that black and white images are regarded as more authentic. By authentic, I mean a specific feeling of reality as the essence of being. Take a look at this image from The NYPL Digital Collections
What are your feelings? I guess you feel the authenticity and “the touch of history.”
How color can help us?
When I refer to the explanatory power of the image, I mean not only the beauty of a Power Point image, presented at a professional conference. It is rather, the power of the image to target the general audience, that I keep in mind. My point is that the events from the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century were massively captured and distributed in a black and white format.
Certainly, I do not mean that there are no colored representations of this period. There have been a wide variety of colored posters and paintings. In this sense, I don't want to contest the fact that, at that time, as at any other time, people managed to live rich and colorful lives.
My concern is rather with our perception of the period. In this sense, my argument is that, despite numerous colored posters from that period, we are still left with much more black and white photographs and movie captions. In addition, the fact that people prefer to collect photographs makes “the black and white perception” even more powerful in the realm of personal memories.
From Lenin's beard to final project
All the above meditations were triggered by a series of discussions with my friends. I showed them my image assignment and the majority expressed their surprise with the fact that Lenin's beard was red.
Beyond the importance of the color of Lenin's beard, I think that this surprise reveals much more about the possibilities of colored images to go beyond the black and white understanding of certain events.
I do not mean that we as historians should color all the black and white images and show colored images as “real representations” of historical figures. My point is that colored images should be placed along with black and white photographs, in order to provide a better understanding of a certain historical event and its characters.
My project deals with the comparative representations of the 1917 Russian Revolution by black and white images and by colored images. Since Bolsheviks or Reds were the one who ultimately succeeded in obtaining power, the Revolution has been known as “Red Revolution.”
In this sense, “Beyond the Red in the Red Revolution” is a project which avoids this monochromatic view of the revolution. My concern is to capture the whole spectrum of the revolutionary colors and its actors.