Cousin Audrey being politically incorrect.

I introduced Cousin Audrey in my lost post and showed her in full ballet mode. But, as other photographs reveal, she also had a penchant for dressing up and, presumably, showed a talent for folk dances from other lands. The postcard below just had ‘Audrey: Russian’ written on the back. As the costume doesn’t strike me as something a Bolshevik would wear, I’m guessing that it reflects Tsarist Imperialism rather than Soviet realism. On the other hand, it could be a Cossack costume, in which case it is remarkably current. A man-made famine often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor) raged in the Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933. It was part of a broader Soviet famine (1931–34) that also caused mass starvation by ill-judged collectivisation in the grain-growing regions of Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan. The Ukrainian famine, however, was made deadlier by a series of political decrees and decisions that were aimed mostly or only at Ukraine. And now we are seeing brutal acts of retribution as the Russian army runs amok in the southern and eastern parts of the country. A modern day Holodomor.

But all of this then and now, was many miles from Audrey Kent’s School of Dancing, behind a bicycle shop in Brighton. Maybe if Audrey was still alive and her  111 year old legs were up to the task, she might have donned this costume once more for a Ukrainian refugee fundraiser. 

This is the untouched photograph. If only I could show such poise.

And this is the same photograph colourised with some software. The question about colourisation is always about how accurate and or realistic the colour rendering is. In this particular instance, not very.

I’m lucky to have a colour version of the same photograph, which  must have been hand-tinted. There’s no reason to suppose that the colours are not accurate and they show that the colourised version is a pale imitation of the original. So, a technique to be used with caution, although the skin tones do add a little life  to the image.