The Faces of Auschwitz: Digital Colourisation, Ethics and the Archive

Colourisation describes the retrospective digitisation and addition of colour to analogue photographs and films that were initially recorded for use in a black and white format. Digitised versions of photochemical materials are increasingly the first point of public access to museum collections and film archives, colourisation can emphasise or diminish details that were considered salient to the photographer. In the case of Holocaust photography – particularly that produced by its perpetrators – colourisation can perform other functions, involving complex negotiations between past and present. Colourisation manipulates images so that they are not reproduced in the form that perpetrator-photographers created, kept or studied. In doing this, the digital editing technique of colourisation is pre-figured by other methods used by museums and film-makers to interrogate perpetrator-produced images and disrupt their ideological function. In this article, we explore the ethical implications of colourisation as it has been used in the Faces of Auschwitz project, Marina Amaral’s collaboration with the Auschwitz Museum. Amaral has colourised 21 registration photographs taken by the camp Political Department’s Identification Service (Erkennungsdienst). We place this project in a lineage of films which also show and alter the registration photographs – Ordinary Fascism (dir. Mikhail Romm, USSR, 1965) and The Portraitist (dir. Ireneusz Dobrowolski, 2005) – as well as a film that uses colour slides taken by a German perpetrator Photographer (dir. Dariusz Jabłoński, 1998). We suggest that Amaral’s colourisations take the form of an artistic intervention and re-mediation in a similar way to these films, rather than as the historical research which she claims it to be.