What if Titanic photos were retouched by editors, how does this portray the great ship? A rare photo may show this is just what happened!
The Titanic is steeped in mystery, dramatic stories of life and death and survival but what if those early photos were retouched?
I was fortunate enough to restore a rare photo of the Titanic from an avid collector of Titanic Memorabilia. He has allowed me to use this photo in this blog post as it shows the now-famous Titanic photo of “letting go the rope” at Southampton docks, in an altogether different light.
You may have seen this image on many websites, for sale or even on museum walls. It normally depicts a scene of what looks like a clear crisp April morning but was that exactly how it was and was the great ship so romantic looking? If in doubt simply Google the image and you’ll see what I mean. Here is a quick example.
The normal depiction of Titanic at Southampton
Below is the Titanic in perhaps more accurate representation.
Print of Titanic 1912 Southampton rare new depiction – (un-restored version with light damage)
This restored scan of fibre based silver halide print of the Titanic shows an altogether different ship. Was this an early version of this famous photo, perhaps even the original one? The sky is not clear at all but choked in smoke from the funnels, neighbouring tug boats also belching smoke adding to the smog. The sky, way above the ship stained with burnt fuel in a thick haze. This image is clearly a very different one from what you see in the press! The famous photo you see is perhaps not what you imagine it to be!
Print of Titanic 1912 Southampton rare new depiction – (restored version)
Versions of this photo in the press and public eye show a cleaner, more romantic version, with cleaner plumes of smoke, perhaps more like we imagined them to be, as a quaint cottage in a landscape painting with a gentle whiff of smoke from the chimney.
This article is solely the opinion of the author.
The Titanic left from Southampton, not Portsmouth.
Thank you i’ll update the post!
Having worked as a photographic librarian in a museum with a large historical collection of photographs I agree with Neil’s minimal restoration to just the damaged area.
However I wonder if the difference can be explained by the fact that neil was working with a silver-halide print and the picture was cropped.
I would like to see neil’s restored print converted to monochrome without the colour information and cropped to match the example print he showed.
Comparing like with like would give a better answer to the question of previous attempts of retouching, although this would not have been done by an editor but a skilled photographer working in a dark room trying different exposure times as well as dodging and burning areas of the print.
I see where you are coming from there Robert. However it doesn’t take much of a search on the Internet to see in Google images that even “fine art” sales site selling famous prints on fine art paper, have the modern version of the restore I performed. That is to say the modern cleaned up, brightened, bleached out, black and white, with less smoke and mood. Look around with the correct key phrases and there are many examples. I do not wish to post them all here for I am keen to avoid using other images to respect web etiquette but they are out there for us all to see! My point is that I have been unable to find another example like the one in this post. Therefore my only conclusion has to be that all the other versions i have seen have been altered.