Joking apart, there are of course art forms that use black and white. Line drawings, charcoal, for instance, and I'm not denying their value as art.

But I don't see what's so sacrilegious about making realistic what was intended to be realistic.

Looking at those images, I don't see a single one where the impact is lessened by the conversion.

The thing is, even phrasing the question like this is prejudging it.

I don't think she's 'messing around' with anything. She hasn't altered any of Ansel Adams' pictures (which are already as messed around with as you could get!), she's taken portraits and news images of the day, and shown how they would have looked, rather than how they had to look due to the limitations of the technology.

She hasn't coloured in the originals. They're still the same.

This will remain true, I suspect, only in the art world, where it's important to eliminate the distraction of colour sometimes.

In a few decades time, when all us old farts that have any reason to remember the periods in question, have died off, I suspect B&W photography will be regarded as a quirk, a pre-Facebook anomaly.

Yes, it's dreadful. The only justification would be if it was intended to look like fading colour - I have some old prints that look a bit like this.

I wonder if this is an element of why a few people react so violently against these coloured images.

My take on it isn't that 'they could have been taken yesterday', it's 'they would have been taken like that at the time, if they could have been."

Ah. So that's who Karsh is

Yes, this is exactly the point I've been trying to make. Thanks for expressing it so well.

What is disrespectful about colouring them in?

Yes, because the scene was originally in colour

You're really not.

The great photography of the day was no less great for being in B&W. Sometimes, the isolation of form from colour probably heightened the impact.

But such isolation is artificial, not real.

We see in colour.

And here, pretty much.

Would you like to be able to see only in black and white?

Of course you wouldn't. That's why it's not counter-intuitive.

No, I'm not surprised. I expect most old-school (I don't use the term pejoratively) photographers who grew up with black and white, and remember those events in conjunction with the iconic photos of the day, would prefer the B&W images.

As I say, B&W is a useful technique for isolating form from colour. But it's rubbish when colour is important.

And if it wasn't for history of photography, which is of course mostly B&W, B&W wouldn't, I suspect, have the status it does.