Last week a cache of rare color photos from the Depression Era made the rounds on the Internet. In case you missed them, I’m including several below this post. Shot by photographers working for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI), the photos were taken between 1939 and 1944.

As I looked at these, a past I’d always pictured in shades of black and white now leapt into the colorful verisimilitude of the present. My fascination got me to thinking about how I picture various times in history. I realized that there is only one span of history that I picture in black and white. That span begins with the invention of the daguerreotype in the late 1830′s and ends with the gradual wide-spread adoption of color photography from 1950 through 1970 and on. Because the vast majority of photographs and films I’ve seen from that era are in black and white, I tend to visualize that era in the same fashion.

Reflecting further, I realized that I have no problem imagining history before that time in color. Columbus arriving in the new world, Martin Luther nailing his 95 thesis to the door of the church in Wittenberg, the American Revolution, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire…all of these things exist in my mind in vivid color. Given that there’s no black and white photographs of any of these events and times (and plenty of color movies about them), it makes sense that this is the case. All the same, it is fascinating to me to be consciously aware of these divisions of color in my mind.

How do you perceive the past? In color, black and white, sepia, all of the above or something else all together? For those of you who’ve lived prior to the advent of modern color film, it’s understandable that you’d remember those times in the colors that you saw with your own eyes. Still, I think it would be interesting for each of us to peer into the other’s mind’s eye and experience the difference in perception.