In 2011 a team of researchers led by Australian journalist Ross Coulthart made an incredible discovery when they uncovered a collection of hundreds of photographs from World War One.
The photographs were taken by a French couple, Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, during the First World War and are a fantastic and very natural collection of portraits of Allied soldiers who were billeted in the village when they were away from the trenches.
The collection of images lay undiscovered for a century in the attic of a French farmhouse in the village of Vignacourt for almost one hundred years. Ross Coulthart has since collected the images together in a book called ‘The Lost Tommies‘.
When the BBC’s The One Show began a public plea to try and identify these Lost Tommies, colorizers for the WW1 Colourised Photos Facebook page rose to the challenge and, led by Doug Banks, started to colorize these fascinating images in order to bring the subjects ‘to life’ and help the Lost Tommies appeal.
I have been colorizing photos for a number of years, and when Doug suggested the colorizing project, I was delighted to make my contribution by colorizing the images featured in this article.
Of the hundreds of pictures, I chose these particular ones because of their clarity, and crispness of the faces. I believe that color can add another dimension to a person’s face, and aid in recognising family resemblances in old photographs, hopefully aiding the campaign to identify the Lost Tommies.
I have included the original images and my colorized and restored versions below. None of the men in these photographs have been identified, and this is just a tiny selection of the thousands of images in the collection. Colorized contributions from other artists can be seen on the WW1 Colourised Photos Facebook page, and the original images are included in Ross Coulthart’s book.
This selection of images is a tiny fraction of the photos found in Vignacourt.
I would like to thank Ross Coulthart for his permission to include the photos in this article, and The Kerry Stokes Collection – Louis & Antoinette Thuillier Images for making them available in the first place. Ross Coulthart’s book ‘The Lost Tommies‘ is a William Collins publication, and is available to purchase online and in all good bookshops.
If you should happen to recognise any of the men in these photographs, please get in touch in the comments below.
Image credits: Original images courtesy of Ross Coulthart, author of ‘The Lost Tommies’ & The Kerry Stokes Collection – Louis & Antoinette Thuillier. All colorized versions are © Tom Marshall (PhotograFix) 2016.
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