Colouring in the past

There is something of The Wizard of Oz about Marina Amaral’s photographs. She whisks us from black-and-white Kansas to shimmering Technicolor Oz. When Howard Carter leans over Tutankhamun’s open sarcophagus (1922), he does so in the glare of pharaonic gold. A photograph of fallen American soldiers on the Gettysburg battlefield (1863) shocks the more when we see the colour of the blood soaking through shirts. The Javanese dancers who performed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1889) are gorgeous in madder pinks, jades and golds. I’ve seen this picture a dozen times, rolled out to illustrate the influence of ‘exotic’ dancers on artists and choreographers, but I’d never considered that what attracted Rodin and Degas wasn’t just movement and form but colour, glorious colour.

‘My goal,’ says 23-year-old Amaral, ‘is not to replace black-and-white photographs or to do something better than the original photographer. What I try to do is to build a bridge between the present and the past.’