Color Corrected "Bound for Glory"
Jason Kottke has grabbed a few examples from the Library of Congress' "Bound for Glory" online exhibition of 1930s color photography and applied some Photoshop kungfu (color correction) to bring a sense of "taken today" to these photographs. Striking and I'm embarassed I hadn't thought of it before.
Its amazing that the people scanning these images would not do some basic color correction to images that have obviously deteriorated due to time. If they were my images I would be mad as hell if they represented my work that way.
-Will
Have the images really deteriorated? Yes, film colors and values shift over time. But it's important to remember that different films record color differently. Consider the quality of Fuji Velvia color, which seems to me more vivid than life, vs. Kodak Portra NC, which is far more muted. The Library of Congress files might more accurately reflect the colors that the original photographers intended. Certainly they are closer to the prints that I have seen from the period.
It's another variation on the preservation–restoration dilemma: whether to merely preserve something as it is against further ravages of time or to attempt to "restore" it to a lost state (while running the risk of misrepresenting what it once was).
It's certainly less critical in this case, when we're not dealing with the originals, but it's the same basic question.