The «Turkestan Album» in color

The "Turkestan Album" is one of the main photo documents that recorded the life of Central Asian people of the 19th century. Published by the order of Governor General Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman, the album presents a colonial ethnographic survey of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Working with the materials of this archive as with artifacts and thinking about what these images would look like in color, we used Photoshop and the open-source code DeOldify to edit black and white images. Artists from different generations regularly used these photographs to create new works. We hope that these color photographs will also become an impulse for reflection and inspiration. It is important to note that this colorization of photography can be called rather an interpretation, colors, in this case, are not a historical reconstruction.