Touching up: are we wrong to colourise old photographs?

Sprucing up black-and-white photographs is all the rage, but there are questions to ask

Swipe your phone, gaze at a 42in plasma screen, or just look at packaging for children's toys, or the interior of a McDonald's. We live and breathe a world delirious with colour. Black and white photographs are olde-worlde, connoting stasis and sobriety in tones of grey but Adobe Photoshop's alchemy comes to the rescue, showering them in technicolour. Colourisation, it seems, salvages photographs from the dustbin of history. Retrographic is an anthology of colourised images, showcasing the work of professional colourisers as well as what the compiler, Michael Carroll, calls "skilled hobbyists"

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