The Department of Art History of the University of Toronto is pleased to present the 2024 W. Bernard Herman Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Art History Lecture by Peter Geimer.

The past is unobservable. We hear or read about it, remember it, look at its remains or retrospectively imagine what it was like. But none of these forms of remembrance restore the past: what we know or imagine about it, we only learn about indirectly from stories, documents, images, and material remains. In this process of reconstructing the past, images play a crucial role: history painting, photography, film, digital reanimation. After a brief overview of these different forms of historical reconstruction, the lecture focuses on some case studies of photography and film – in particular a media practice that has increasingly shaped the way historical archives have been handled in recent decades: the digital re-coloring of historical photographs and films in order to make history “more lively”, “more authentic”, “more tangible”. So are the historically preserved black and white photographs outdated? And do their colored substitutes really bring us closer to the past?