There’s an exhibition on at the moment at The Photographer’s Gallery in London called Primrose: Early Colour Photography in Russia. Here’s an image from the exhibition. I particularly like the theme – it’s a still of a rumba dance from a 1928 film called Albidum by Alexander Rodchenko. The print is silver gelatin with added crayon:
I was trying to think if there any of my own images i could pair with this one – here’s a picture I took a few years ago at a tango tea dance in Regents Park. I’ve faded the colours to give it a more retro feel – but the heavily pregnant dancing woman displaying her belly brings it more up to date:
Here’s a photograph from my collection; a real hand-coloured photo, probably taken in a studio in Jerusalem in the mid to late 1920s. It’s a picture of my Aunt Hannah, known to me as Ameh, who was born in Mashhad, Iran, in 1921 and who left Iran with her family to go to Palestine in 1923.
Back in the late 80s I did a self-portraiture project where I was researching and expressing identity issues. Here are some pictures I took and hand coloured. In these first images I am wearing my late grandmother’s bridal veil which she brought over from Iran:
The image below is the more expressionist and assertive, with big hair and percussion!