Losing It: The Question of Color in the Digitization of Gisele Freund’s Archives

When German-born French author Gisele Freund used the latest technological development to take color photographs of intellectuals and artists in the Paris of the 1930s, she had no other means to share them than by organizing slide projections. In the process, so often repeated as it became her specialty, she actually damaged her photographs, which lost a lot of their original colors. It greatly concerned her when she was alive, and it inevitably became one of our main issues as we undertook the digitization of her archives. How to embrace their contemporary decayed form without hurting their reputation? In other words: how would a Virginia Woolf fan feel if we chose to disseminate, for her only color portrait ever done, the original slide as is, which presents a washed out version of what it might have looked like, instead of a restored version seeking “authenticity”? What does it mean to retouch these images, in order to have them look “the way they used to”? Are we even capable of recreating them, when no one can really tell what the colors of early Kodachrome and Agfacolor films actually were, since all vintage material preserved today has deteriorated? This project brought up many questions relating to conventions of viewing photography, especially historical material for which time is an inherent component, yet still visually rejected by most audiences. My presentation will discuss these broader questions, in the context of an exceptional collection of early color photographs being revived and made public.