Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 13, 1990 TAG: 9003133069
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUG FISHER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WESTERLY, R.I. LENGTH: Medium
Almost daily you can still find her at a little red table near the window of her storefront studio, carefully coloring photographs by hand. There's an old bellows camera in the back, and shelves are piled high with papers, photographs and tools of her trade.
Propped around her are examples of her handiwork, a technique that is regaining popularity in art schools. That makes little impression on her.
Spargo is a woman of few words, especially describing how she learned her trade nearly 60 years ago.
"I just did it on my own," she says. "Don't ask me how I learned. I just did it."
Working from detailed notes, Spargo skillfully transfers nearly transparent oil paint from a piece of cotton to the faces in a family portrait.
She had just spent several painstaking hours working with a colored pencil and brush to tint the woman's blue print dress.
"That was a Lulu. It's not quite right, but it's close," she says, admiring her work and wistfully recalling the days when clothes were plainer.
She works quickly, with widening circular strokes. If she strays, the paint can be wiped away up until it fully dries in about a day. The artistry comes in blending the colors and highlighting the features, so the boy's blue eyes have a lifelike, almost impish sparkle.
A typical 8-by-10-inch single portrait costs $50 to tint, but if you want heavier opaque oils that must be brushed on, that's $200.
Hand coloring emerged in the 1840s, shortly after daguerreotypes, the first commercially feasible photos taken on glass plates, says David Gibney, negative archivist of the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, N.Y.
At first, a little blush was added to the cheeks and a splash of color to jewelry, he says. Fully tinted photos became popular after the turn of the century and remained so until color photo materials improved and became affordable in the 1940s.
"I think a lot of sins that the camera's lens brings out can be hidden with hand coloring," says Gibney, "and you can enhance the good things."
Hand coloring has made a comeback in college fine arts programs during the past 10 years as a new art form, says E. Ken White, a hand colorer and chairman of fine art photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Even the best color print will begin to age in five years, White says, but hand-colored photos can last 50 years without much deterioration.
Spargo doesn't recall the specifics of when she got into the business. She says it was sometime in the 1930s, and she was 19 when she went to work for photographer Fred Stiles at his downtown studio. Four years later she bought the studio.
It was at a national photography workshop at Winona Lake, Ind., where she went to learn more about commercial photography, that she took up hand coloring.
Spargo had planned to do color photography, but the 1938 hurricane wiped out much of Westerly and supplies were hard to get. After that, other things came up and "I just never did. I don't know why."
She does a good business in copying and retouching old photographs, but she discourages people from having them hand colored because they seldom know the original hues.
In her own way, she hews to tradition, even while adding color to black and white, and that's why she doesn't like the trend toward colorizing movies. She says she likes them better the way they are.
"They were made that way," she says. "Why change them? It's just a notion I have."
by CNB