Vintage Hard Laboring Technicians
January 28, 2013 5:30 PM   Subscribe

Colorized Photos of Women Building War Planes in the 1940s By exhibiting a polychromatic set of photos, the images are no longer just recorded pieces of history that we feel a disconnect from. They appear to be a more life-like, relatable series of photos. posted by weeyin (9 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: These are great but we've seen them here before -- jessamyn



 
Some of these almost look *too colorful*, like black and white movies that have been over-colorized.
posted by mrbill at 5:31 PM on January 28, 2013


Beyond expressing how correct the idea of this treatment making the photos more "relatable" is, I was startled to note how much more relatable the photo of the woman wearing the 66 badge is, because my father owned the exact same drill and I used that thing constantly from a very young age.
posted by davejay at 5:35 PM on January 28, 2013


Those radial engines are enormous. It's incredible they were able to make so many so quickly.
posted by hellslinger at 5:38 PM on January 28, 2013


Beautifully done.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:41 PM on January 28, 2013


Well, this is making me want to burst out into "L'Internationale" all over again.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 5:42 PM on January 28, 2013


I'm not sure why they're calling these "colorized". They're Kodachromes, and were in color to begin with, though Dave Hall over at Shorpy does clean them up some from the originals on the Library of Congress site.
posted by Lazlo Nibble at 5:43 PM on January 28, 2013


Yeah, these are actual color photos. Kodachrome had a tendency to show reds more vividly than other colors (which can give Kodachrome photos a not-quite-real look) but those colors were not added in afterward.
posted by ocherdraco at 5:49 PM on January 28, 2013


The truest tribute I can think of to the enduring power of these photographs is that they've been posted to Metafilter more times than I can count, most recently in March.

And, as several people have pointed out, they're not colorized, they're color.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:55 PM on January 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


(Though it's color that you can't create anymore.)
posted by bubukaba at 5:59 PM on January 28, 2013


« Older Baguette-me-nots   |   D I C K H A N D Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments