How does the process of colourisation affect our understanding of history?

It seems scary how wrong our understanding sometimes goes. We can get many details right and yet totally miss the essence. Roman and ancient Greek buildings have all been bleached by the wind over time. Which makes us think they were white because they used pretty white concrete. That's what they look now.

In fact they were very colorful, with drawings everywhere.

Same thing with their texts. The surviving texts have been selected. First by Romans themselves, then by medieval religious people. And while at least Christians were very good about copying letter by letter (thus preserving the less Christian aspects of the texts, with tidbits like celebrating Sentors' birthdays with "no more than 3 prostitutes per senator, and 2 per guest", along with the medical knowledge that that attitude preserved as well), they're still selected works.

Over the past 3-4 decades it's become clear that Romans, at least in the center of the Empire, were vulgar (constant cursing, prostitution at a scale you wouldn't believe, orgies, parties, wine and alcohol everywhere and for every last occassion. They had advertisements (which were fun, because most people in Rome couldn't read. There was thus no point in making a commercial message like "best doctor ever" or "pools improved again", "now cheaper" ... no point, they'd just paint an emblem on essentially any wall)

People would graffiti down contact info for people's wives, children, slaves, or just the people themselves, insulting them by listing what sex acts they're (one presumes allegedly) good at. Or just questioning their legal status or the like.

That's the sort of society that existed in the center of the ancient world. This cold, stoic, organized, rigid society you see in every movie and quite a few books probably never existed.

I found it impossible to believe that the photo in the article was from 1865, but it is: https://www.google.com/search?q=Lewis+Powell&source=lnms&tbm.... It's not only the color; his hair and his expression seem completely modern.

The work done to clean up the footage in that Peter Jackson documentary is impressive, but the colorization is not. It basically looks like a movie colorization from the 80s, where they just segmented the image and painted one color over each section.

I think what is missing when people think about colorization is how the the look, feel and fidelity of an image places it in our minds. It is less about the exact colors than the specific style of color palette that we have catalogued in our brains with all kinds of weird associations.

Right now we think colorization looks great when it looks like a modern, natural palette from a photo shoot or movie, but it looks schmaltzy and cheap when it mirrors some 1950s over-saturated early foray into color film. We have those placeholders in our minds and quickly deduce which is good and which is bad.

But those verdicts change over time because they are as much fashion as anything. For example, many Instagram filters emulated early film cameras but now people simply look at certain photos and dismiss them of they look too filtered.

Or a new trend I've noticed in YouTube music videos where they are made to look like old VHS camcorder home movies for some ungodly reason. Those VHS artifacts are now a style choice because we've see interesting things that have those attributes and want to capture some of that spirit.

Color is always going to be a style choice and colorization choices say as much about what we are used to seeing right now as they do about how things looked in reality back then... though they are weirdly and closely intertwined.

I watch a lot of documentaries. There is a big shift in behavior from pre-2000 to post-2000. Pre-2000 is pre reality tv and pre technology. Nowadays people approach interviews differently. I'm not saying one is more real than the other and it is clear people have different goals/mindsets when being interviewed.

The 'colourisation' (foreign spelling) of astronomy photos is also misleading. I blame it on the allures of 'artist's conception' pictures like Bonestell's. Seems we prefer a fantasy universe.