August 25, 2026

Book Review: The Colorizing Pro

Jordan Lloyd, creative director of Unseen Histories and co-author of History as They Saw It, described The Colorizing Pro as comprehensive and praised its fascinating glimpses into 20th-century America.

The Colorizing Pro: Art, Nostalgia, and a Theory of Visual Cognition is part memoir, part how-to guide, part philosophical and theoretical argument about how we interpret visual experiences, and part art gallery.

For Hale, colorizing old photographs is not merely about adding color. It is an interpretive act that exposes how people mentally construct reality from incomplete information.

We do it every day. We are doing it now. As soon as Hale employed that construct to add color to old photographs, creating art became almost spontaneous.