Consider The Ethics Of Colorizing Black And White Historical Photos

Fortune online magazine released a story on 5/12/2021 about a firm that took historical black and white photographs and added realistic colors. As one might expect, some people cried “foul” over the digital manipulation of the images, and critics claimed to have proof that some of the facial expressions were also modified to make smiles out of frowns. Since the images originated in Khmer Rouge jails in war time, it was not long before the Cambodian government condemned the process as an “insult to the dead.”

Read the entire story here, and see some work by the colorist here.

Khmer Rouge Victims (detail) on display at the Genocide Museum (prevously the Tuol Sleng prison) in Phnom Penh from a Reuters story about the colorization.