Historical photographs, researched and restored in full color

The past was never black and white.

The people in old photographs feel far away because we only know them in gray. They were not far away. The streets they built are the streets we walk, and the world they were making is the one we live in. We find their photographs in the public archives, give back the color the camera could not keep, and research each one until its story can be told and checked.

See the current collection

Why we do this

The people in these photographs were building the world we live in.

They went to work. They fed cities before dawn, ran the streetcars, raised the wharves and the storefronts, and most of them never had their names written down. Their years survive on glass plates in public archives, catalogued, digitized, and mostly unseen.

We bring those photographs back. The color is restored carefully and from the record, using modern professional digital techniques, onto the original scan, so every grain of the plate survives and nothing is invented. Then comes the slower work: reading the plate under magnification, following every painted sign and every date into the sources, until the story behind the photograph can be told and checked. The color fills in what the camera could not keep. The research fills in the rest.

We do this because the past deserves to be seen the way it was lived, in color, by people with trades and names and arguments, and because a place you know looks different once you have seen who built it. Our heritage runs further back than we usually remember. It is worth being proud of, and it is worth getting right.

Detail from the plate: a driver seated on his loaded wagon on Decatur Street, a clothing store behind him
The Old French Market, New Orleans, c. 1890. Loaded wagons fill the roadway, and the drivers ride their own loads.

One example, from the current collection

Everything in this picture is evidence.

Before a photograph goes any further, we read it at full size and write down only what is actually there. This plate was sold as a souvenir view of the French Market in New Orleans. Here is what it told us.

A line of loaded mule wagons on the street beside the French Market in New Orleans, with a man standing on an empty flatbed dray at the right and painted shopfront signs for hardware, stoves, ship chandlery and groceries on the buildings behind.
Plate 1. The Old French Market, New Orleans, c. 1890. Attributed to William Henry Jackson. Library of Congress. The numbers mark the three details read below.
  1. Detail: the painted shopfront band reading 227 Hardware Stoves and Ship Chandlery 229

    The frame dates itself.

    Painted across the shopfronts on the right: 227 HARDWARE STOVES and SHIP CHANDLERY 229. New Orleans changed to its present hundred-block numbering in the early 1890s, so these numbers belong to the old system, and they place the buildings in what is now the 900 block of Decatur Street.

  2. Detail: a long painted board carrying the name Salatich and Baccich

    Painted signs outlive the firms that pay for them.

    Across the street, a board carries the name Salatich & Baccich, a grocery and commission house whose partnership had ended by the middle of the decade. With the street numbers, it points to the earlier part of the bracket the Library gives, 1880 to 1897. We do not narrow the date further than the record allows.

  3. Detail: the caption lettered along the bottom of the negative, 8113, The Old French Market, New Orleans

    The record is on the glass itself.

    Along the bottom margin, lettered into the negative: 8113, The Old French Market, New Orleans, Detroit Photographic Co. That number matches the Library of Congress record for the plate, which attributes it to William Henry Jackson and has held it since 1949. Every claim on the print's page carries a source you can follow.

The market these wagons fed is the oldest of its kind in the United States. Read the whole story on the print's page.

New Orleans, 1900

New Orleans 1900 is the first collection Past in Color has published. The photographs were made in the city around the turn of the twentieth century, between the 1880s and 1907. All of them come from the negatives of the Detroit Photographic Company, later the Detroit Publishing Company, a firm that sold views of American cities by the thousand to travelers who wanted to take a place home with them. The Library of Congress credits some of the plates to William Henry Jackson. On others the photographer was never recorded, and we do not guess. The company's negatives passed to the Library of Congress in 1949, and that collection is where these images come from. Each print's page names the archive it came from.

These were commercial pictures, and that is exactly why they are worth looking at now. Nobody was posing the city for posterity. The cathedral turns up at the end of a rutted, cobbled street, with the utility poles and the overhead wires still in the frame. Canal Street appears twice, once with animal-powered streetcars and once with electric cars, more than a decade apart. That gap is the moment the city changed how it moved. Shop signs name the firms that were trading on each block. Some of those names belonged to immigrants who built their businesses here. These photographs were sold as souvenirs. They survive as evidence. Anyone can buy a picture of New Orleans. Almost nobody knows the story behind it. Each print carries the story we could verify, and an honest note of what remains unknown.

Every photograph here is carefully restored in full color using modern professional digital techniques. Every detail you see is in the original photograph. Only the color is new. Nothing is redrawn, sharpened, or invented. Each photograph is then printed in a small fixed edition, and the edition size is stated on its page. When an edition sells out it closes. When the collection sells out it moves to the archive, and we do not reprint it. If you have a question about a photograph or a print, write to support@pastincolor.com.

The first collection

New Orleans, 1900 opens in

Everyone on the list receives an access code the morning the collection opens. We only write when something is ready.