He colorized photographs of the bomb’s mushroom cloud and of the Japanese Special Attack Units, then posted them to social media. It creates a distance from the war, depriving viewers of a way to relate it to themselves,” he says. “Everyone is so used to color photographs now that monochrome photographs seem inorganic, static, almost frozen. They did not do a good enough job of conveying their importance.
Ai colorize archive#
He realized then why few visitors to the Hiroshima Archive seemed moved by the monochrome pictures on display, although reactions to recorded testimony from bombing survivors was strong. It was like the people in those photographs had come alive.
Ai colorize software#
He used open-source automatic colorization software developed by Waseda University Professor Ishikawa Hiroshi to add color to photographs of Hiroshima taken just after the war, and the results shocked him. Watanave first encountered AI-based automatic monochrome photograph colorization technology in 2016. She had seen pictures of Okinawa from before World War II that Watanave had colorized in his workshop, and felt firsthand their power to bring memories of those distant years closer to today. “I knew it would make him happy if I could give him colorized versions of those photographs,” she says. Niwata listened to him speak about his family while they looked through his old photographs together, and had an idea. He was rescued from the rubble of his home, but everyone else in his family perished.
Hamai’s childhood home was in the old Nakajima area of Hiroshima, where his father also ran a barber shop before the bombing. Niwata met Hamai Tokusō to record his statement as an atomic bomb survivor.
The first time Niwata Anju noticed that mysterious power was three years ago, when she was a tenth grader.Īs a high school student, Niwata was a member of a committee recording testimonies for the Hiroshima Archive, a project that University of Tokyo Professor Watanave Hidenori launched in 2011 as a way to preserve for posterity materials related to the atomic bombing through technology and art. Converting color photographs to monochrome or sepia can give them a nostalgic feeling, but what of the reverse, colorizing monochrome photographs? It can give them a new feeling of life and immediacy.
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