Stories by Steve Craig, Special to the Fosters Sunday Citizen

Anyone wondering about the allure of a hand-colored photograph should take a trip to Images of the Past Gallery in Dover. Here you can see the effective marriage of photo and paint.

The print is, by its very nature, a precise rendering of an exact moment. Whether a sunset over a birch-lined pond in New Hampshire, or the bustle of a turn-of-the-century Dover street, it is a piece of captured history. But add the warm hue of color, something the original photograph could not do, and the image is infused with a timeless, almost living energy.

The impact of these photos is something that photographers like Charles Henry Sawyer, the owner of the Sawyer Pictures of Concord, were well aware of in the first half of the 20th century. Men like Sawyer built thriving businesses because they were able to meld real places with artistic qualities.

In essence, the economic heyday for hand-painted photography ended when color film became readily available to any weekend photographer. But that doesn’t mean the beauty of a truly well done hand-colored photograph disappeared. It simply lost its audience.

MIRA HINDLE, who partners with her husband, Thom, at the Images of the Past Gallery in Dover, hand-colors a historic photo. (Sunday Citizen photo/Craig)

Thom and Mira Hindle, the husband-and-wife owners of Images of the Past, are aiding the small but persistent resurgence of interest in hand-painted photographs. For starters, Thom has collected a huge stockpile of original glass plate negatives — more than 100,000 from at least 38 known photographers — including many of the original Sawyer negatives. Since the cost of preservation was becoming burdensome and he owned reproduction rights, Thom began offering reprints from the old negatives.

"Then I said to Thom, why can’t I try coloring some of the prints?" Mira says.

"I had no reason to feel she couldn’t do that," Thom says. "Mira had done coloring before, she has the patience to do it and she’s critical enough that if it’s not right, she’ll know it."

Thus, a 20th-century art form found a home for a new millennia.

"We’re trying to preserve the techniques, as well as images, while recognizing the photographers and the work they did," says Thom.

While the genre is usually referred to as hand-painted photography, the Hindles feel the term "coloring" is really more appropriate. The objective is to impart a soft effect by adding hues with a transparent oil paint. For the most part, the details exist within the negative. Some are certainly accentuated by the addition of color.

The first steps in creating a hand-colored photograph are taken in the darkroom. These are Thom’s areas of expertise and few people are more qualified. A studio photographer, nationally recognized collector of photographic images and equipment, and photo historian, Thom combines great attention to detail with tremendous knowledge of his vast inventory.

"It’s gotten to the point where I can tell some type of story about almost every print we make," Thom says.

Thom uses a restored enlarger designed to make prints from glass plate negatives. He says that enlargers designed for acetate film (i.e., typical rolled film) apply too much heat and pressure to the glass negatives, usually breaking them in the process.

Using top-quality photo papers, which are in increasingly short supply from U.S. manufacturers, he makes a print of a specific size.

A print being made for coloring is prepared differently than one that will be given a sepia wash. Both would be different than a straight black-and-white reproduction.

At this point, Mira takes over.

Her first job is to inspect her husband’s work, making sure the print has the correct balance between contrast and detail to lend itself to being colored. Occasionally the image itself is better suited to remain black-and-white (the well-known "Flume" by Sawyer is an example).

"I’m the quality control on him," she says with a laugh, adding more seriously, "I know what I can do and what I cannot."

Typically she will begin her coloring at the top of the photograph. "I start with the sky. If it’s a portrait, I start with the skin tones first," Mira says.

While hardly a common technique, the Hindles are not the only people doing hand-coloring of photographs. They are, however, among a select few who use the traditional, detail-oriented coloring that typified the genre. As much as anything, it is the detail that made the works of Sawyer and contemporaries like Wallace Nutting appealing in their day and highly desirable today as collectibles.

Mira emphasizes the mixture of colors, often aided by original notes that Thom acquired along with the negatives. Other hand-colored photographs typically use colors straight from the tube and/or color only portions of the photo, Thom says.

Mira says that each print takes between eight and 15 hours to color. It is both time-consuming and demanding in its attention to detail.

Many of the prints on display in the Hindle studio have been made from the negatives of Sawyer, the noted New Hampshire photographer of landscape scenes.

While Thom possesses the reproduction rights to 38 different photographers — many relatively unknown — it’s apparent he has a soft spot for the Sawyers.

The newly reproduced prints are, in all honesty, the equal in terms of beauty and appeal to The Sawyer Pictures originals. In some cases they may actually be better, since the Hindle reproductions are in perfect condition, a claim very few Sawyer originals from the 1920s and 1930s can make.

Thom is very careful to make sure that the work he and his wife produce can be distinguished from an original.

For instance, works from The Sawyer Company itself carry the Sawyer signature on the front, either on the print itself or the matting. A Hindle reproduction of a Sawyer negative will not have the signature and will clearly state on the back that it is from the "Thom Hindle Collection." The original photographer, when known, will be credited and in most cases Thom is able to give a brief historical description of the location or significance of the photo.

"Most of our market is to decorate, office spaces and the like, not to market to the collector," Thom says.