AMELIA Earhart, freckled, boyish, smiling, sits in the cockpit of her Lockheed Electra 10E in 1937. In no time at all, she’ll disappear on an attempt to circumnavigate the globe by air for the first time.

Mata Hari stands in luminous, soft-skinned profile. Her hair is almost auburn and her lips are stained with red lipstick.

Rasputin, scowling in a blue coat, has narrowed his eyes against the lens of the camera as if he’s suspicious of it. He’s middle aged and at the height of his powers over the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas, and his desperate wife, Tsarina Alexandra.

These images, likely to be familiar in their monochromatic form to many already, have now been infused with colour by artist Marina Amaral. The effect is startling.

General George Custer – dour, dry, historic – is suddenly gingery and waspish, turning choleric blue eyes on his viewer. He’s 26, and he’s been married for a year to a woman he met and loved when he was 10 years old. He has less than 11 years left to live.

A US Navy sailor grabs and kisses a stranger in a white dress in Times Square on August 14 1945 – Victory over Japan Day. Their kisses are rough, celebratory, as corporeal as touch.

It often feels as if we can only see history from very far away, as if looking through the wrong end of a telescope. It’s easy, and maybe comforting, to think of those who lived in the past as black and white ghosts, drifting uneasily through textbooks and literature.

Colourising photographs makes our history vivid.

Among the images saturated by Amaral’s digital brushstrokes are the faces of men, women and children transported to Auschwitz. The series, created for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, is almost unbearable to look at. The added colour – pale faces, dark eyes, a pink triangle sewn on a muted, striped uniform – makes it appear as if the haunting photographs were taken yesterday. Once seen, a picture of 14-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka, photographed shorn and beaten in December 1942 shortly before her murder, can never be forgotten.

Some of the images inadvertently tell us more about society today. Amaral posted a photograph of Lewis Powell, who attempted to kill the US secretary of state William H Seward in 1865, on Twitter. The doctored photograph became a viral hit, with social media users dubbing the would-be killer as the ‘hipster assassin’.

Powell, who was hanged for his part in the violent conspiracy, looks so modern you could believe the image was posted on Instagram. Yet the photo was taken when he was aboard the USS Saugus and already in wrist irons after his arrest.

Powell’s photograph in particular bridges the gap between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Colour brings his face to startling life.

Previously, many of the individuals who feature in historic - that is to say, black and white - photographs appear as little more than passive objects, as blank and placid as a bowl of fruit in a Caravaggio painting.

To picture them living and breathing can be a leap of the imagination too far. Our understanding of the Victorians is (unfairly) informed by sepia shots of sullen women and bearded, dull-eyed men in rigid poses.

Suffusing these photographs with colour changes how we see those who populated history.

The image remains the same, but the people pictured are warm. The viewer understands that each of the subjects had a beating heart. These are people who laughed with friends and fell in love and regretted moments of sudden anger and failed at things they cared deeply about, just as we do now.

Colourising the images compresses a hundred years to an instant and allows us to know something about the shortness of the time we have.

  • The Colour of Time: A New History of the World, 1850-1960 by Marina Amaral