A British photo expert has breathed new life into the only confirmed image of Billy the Kid, revealing the Wild West outlaw’s face with a clarity never seen before.
Kent-based digital restorer Nick Harris spent weeks working on the battered 1880 tintype taken in Fort Sumner, the sole authenticated photograph of the legendary gunfighter.
The original image is faint, scratched and so worn down by time that Billy’s true features are almost impossible to make out.
Harris began by working from the high-resolution scan available on Wikipedia, cropping the frame to focus solely on the outlaw’s face before carefully repairing the tintype’s heavy surface damage in Photoshop.
He rebuilt lost detail across the face, balanced the tones and then colourised the portrait, gradually adding natural layers to bring Billy’s skin, clothing and surroundings back to life.
Even after restoration, the tintype remained grainy and lacking modern sharpness, so Harris manually enhanced the portrait further in Photoshop.
He retouched Billy’s hat and clothing for consistency and added a gentle background blur to give the image a contemporary photographic feel.
For a final creative touch, Harris used animation software to make the restored portrait move.
A British photo expert has breathed new life into the only confirmed image of Billy the Kid, revealing the Wild West outlaw’s face with a clarity never seen before
The original image is faint, scratched and so worn down by time that Billy’s true features are almost impossible to make out
The result is a strange but captivating moment where Billy the Kid appears to breathe, blink and come alive again more than a century after his death.
Harris, who runs Harris Photo Restoration in Kent, says his passion for the craft began in 2007 when his family inherited a box of his grandfather’s old photographs.
Seeing those fragile moments fading pushed him to learn restoration, and he now specialises in bringing historic family pictures back to life for clients across the UK.
Every old photograph has lived its own journey, he says.
Whether kept in a purse, stored in a loft or carried through war, each one captures a moment in history that deserves to be preserved’.
The life and death of Billy the Kid
Billy the Kid was a notorious outlaw who lived in the American Wild West during the mid to late 19th century. The subject of more than 50 movies, the local legend, has achieved global notoriety as scriptwriters took the tale of the gun-toting outlaw to big screens around the world.
So who is Billy the Kid and what led to his untimely death at the age of 21?
- Billy the Kid is believed to have been born Henry McCarty in the Irish slums of New York City in September or November of 1859 – though his birth place, date of birth and even birth name is widely debated
- He moved to Wichita, Kansas, as a boy with his single mother, before later migrating west to New Mexico in the early 1870s
- The young Henry became an orphan in 1874 at the age of 14 after his mother died of tuberculosis
- Left in the care of an absentee stepfather he is said to have quickly fallen into a life of poverty, mixed with a rough crowd and soon found himself on a path of crime
- The young lad’s first arrest, and subsequent jailbreak, was said to be for stealing clothes from a local Chinese laundry in 1875. He faced a minor sentence but rather than sit it out behind bars the then 16-year-old escaped and fled town
- In 1877 he arrived in Lincoln County, New Mexico, under the name William Bonney. In August of that year he is said to have killed his first man during a dispute in an Arizona saloon
- He earned a reputation as a gunslinger, a man who was quick to pull the trigger, in 1878 when he participated in the Lincoln County War
- The conflict was marked by revenge killings, including one that saw a gang Billy the Kid was affiliated with kill the Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady
- In late 1880 Bill the Kid was found guilty of the murder of Sheriff William Brady and sentenced to be hanged. But on the evening of April 28, 1881 he slipped out of his handcuffs and ambushed and shot a couple of guards in his prison break
- After his escape from death row the wanted man remained a fugitive from the law till the evening of July 14 1881. Sheriff Pat Garrett and two deputies rode into town where it was believed the fugitive was hiding out. He was taken by surprise, cornered and fatally shot with two bullets by the sheriff
- Despite his reputation as an outlaw of the Wild West Billy the Kid did not live the life of a bandit. He had never robbed a bank, train or stagecoach. Outside of his early years and gun-fighting days in the Lincoln County War his main crime was said to be rustling cattle
Sources: Crime Museum, Britannica, and the History Channel
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Billy the Kid – in colour: Only confirmed photo is transformed from black and white for unique glimpse of the infamous outlaw
