A black and white photo of a Brazilian slave is transformed with colour (Picture: Marina Amaral)

These coloured portraits lay bare the heartbreaking human reality of the slave trade.

The collection of black and white photos come from Brazil, the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery.

It took artist Marina Amaral months of painstaking work on Photoshop, but she manages to breathe life into this snapshot of history from 1869.

Her work transforming photos of Auschwitz prisoners with colour was seen across the world.

But for this series, she decided to focus on her native Brazil to ‘humanise’ the victims of the slave trade.

Portuguese colonists landed in Brazil in 1530 and slavery soon became its central tool in dominating the Americas.

An estimated four million Africans were brought to Brazil during nearly 400 years of slavery, which was finally abolished in 1888.

The photographs from Marina’s new series were taken by Alberto Henschel in Recife and Salvador in 1869.

Marina said Henschel’s most important contribution to the history of photography in Brazil are the portraits he took of slaves ‘because he tried to portray them freely and with dignity, as people and not as objects’.

On her blog, she wrote: ‘The art of colourising has been around since the 1840s.

‘Watercolours, oils, crayons and pastels, among others, were applied to the photos in an attempt to create more realistic images.

‘This is not an attempt to replace the original photographs, which are highly important and of extreme historical value, but, as in my other works, it is an attempt to humanise the people portrayed.

‘It is also an attempt to individualise them, and show that they are not only characters in history books.

‘As nothing is known about the men and women in the photos, I could not do much research.

‘Therefore, the colours you see here are an artistic interpretation, based on my experience, observation, modern photographs, basic preliminary research and artistic guesses.

‘For this reason, they are not necessarily 100 per cent accurate but are as close as possible given the limitations I had throughout the process.’