AI Recreates the Past

Before color photography took off in the 1960s, most photographs existed in black and white. Today, we can appreciate photography from past decades and centuries, but our appreciation for them is limited to the range of colors in which they were developed. More so, photographs don't last forever: if not preserved properly, their images fade, and with it our clarity of their history and memory blurs. Of course, history is not black and white, and nor should personal and global histories fade from memory, especially not colorful moments in American history. Technical advances in artificial intelligence and image processing have created new possibilities for restoring dimensions of color and visuality to historical, photographic artifacts.