Art & Exhibitions
See Glorious Color Photos of King Tut’s Tomb
Photos of the 1922 discovery get a serious makeover.
Photos of the 1922 discovery get a serious makeover.
Sarah Cascone ShareShare This Article
When King Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered in 1922, there was no such thing as color photography, but thanks to the magic of technology, the original images of Howard Carter’s historic archaeological find can now be seen in dazzlingly, true-to-life-like color.
The original photos documenting Carter’s discovery, which took place 93 years ago this month after 15 years of searching, were digitally colored by Jordan Lloyd, founder of Dynamichrome, a company that offers high-fidelity colorization of black-and-white photos.
Harry Burton, the excavation photographer, was sent to the site by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and took some 2,800 glass negatives. Over the course of several months, with the help of careful research to accurately match the original colors, Lloyd has reconstructed a selection of Burton’s original photos of the discovery below, in full color.
The resulting images are stunning—unlike surprisingly-ugly scientific reconstructions of what Tut himself would have looked like. Lloyd’s handiwork will be included in an exhibition on the tomb’s discovery opening this month at New York’s Premier Exhibitions.
“At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker,” Carter wrote of his first glimpse of the tomb. “But presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold.”
King Tut’s tomb has been back in the news of late thanks to new theories that his final resting place may be merely an ante-chamber to the much larger tomb of Nefertiti. Egypt has allowed Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves to search for the lost room, and its discovery may be imminent. The AFP reported that the initial findings from infra-red thermography scans support the theory of a hidden chamber.
Researchers have also painstakingly recreated a copy of King Tut’s tomb using laser scanning and 3-D printing technology. See more images from the exhibition below.
“The Discovery of King Tut” is on view at Premier Exhibitions at 417 5th Avenue beginning November 21, 2015.