Indigenous Daughters & Sons, Prince Rupert, 1909

After spending the last few months colouring historical photos of Prince Rupert, I am now back in my hometown looking at everything with a different perspective. As I drive through town for the first time in two years, I’m mentally overlaying the streets and buildings in the archival photos I painted onto the current landscape.

This week I have been testing a new application licensed by MyHeritage to enhance blurry faces in photos. The photo enhancement technology creates a simulation of what the original faces may have looked like. My test case: this 1909 photo of Indigenous individuals in Prince Rupert. First, I coloured the photo manually using approximately 250 different layers of colour. Then I used MyHeritage’s machine learning technology to bring the blurred, pixelated faces into focus.  I carefully cleaned up the enhanced images (sometimes the robot added beards to the baby’s faces!) and painstakingly layered them onto the coloured photo.

Note that these enhanced faces are a simulation and may not be an accurate representation.

It’s easy to get nostalgic when looking at old black and white photos. People represented in black, white and muted shades of grey seem so far away, as if they are from an ancient time and from a faraway place. As I started colouring this image of indigenous women and children, I started noticing more elements and subtle interactions between the people as they came to life. They seem as alive to me today as they did when James Allen took their picture in 1909. The children below look like they could literally jump out of the photograph into the twenty-first century.