Overview

Capturing the world in color was one of photography's greatest aspirations from the very beginnings of the medium. When color photography became a reality with the introduction of the Autochrome in 1907, prominent photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz were overjoyed. But they quickly came to reject color photography as too aligned with human sight. It took decades for artists to come to understand the creative potential of color, and only in 1976, when John Szarkowski showed William Eggleston's photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, did the art world embrace color. By accepting color's flexibility and emotional transcendence, Szarkowski and Eggleston transformed photography, giving the medium equal artistic stature with painting, but also initiating its demise as an independent art. The catalogue of a major exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, which holds one of the premier collections of American photography, Color tells, for the first time, the fascinating story of color's integration into American fine art photography and how its acceptance revolutionized the practice of art. Tracing the development of color photography from the first color photograph in 1851 to digital photography, John Rohrbach describes photographers' initial rejection of color, their decades-long debates over what color brings to photography, and how their gradual acceptance of color released photography from its status as a second-tier art form. He shows how this absorption of color instigated wide acceptance of a fundamentally new definition of photography, one that blends photography's documentary foundations with the creative flexibility of painting. Sylvie Penichon offers a succinct survey of the technological advances that made color in photography a reality and have since marked its multifaceted development. These texts, illuminated by seventy-five full-page plates and more than eighty illustrations, make this book a groundbreaking contribution to photographic studies.

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9780292753013

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Reviews

The invention of the Autochrome in 1907 ushered color into photography and excited artists at the time. But then something strange happened: they recoiled from color, feeling it was too similar to the way we see the world. If the burgeoning medium of photography couldn't provide something different than what each of us could see using our own eyes, what was it good for? Color: American Photography Transformed tracks the curious history of color in American photography and is a sumptuous beauty to hold in the hand, with images from Walker Evans, Irving Penn and Ansel Adams, among many others. - Kirkus This volume examines in detail what colour brings to photography and its connections to other arts, particularly painting. Expansive in focus and attractively presented 25-30 full-page reproductions illuminate each essay. An overview of technical advances and an impressive bibliography conclude the book. Entertaining, informative and vivid in its examples, this new scholarly interpretation is a valuable work... Summing Up: Highly recommended - Choice

The invention of the Autochrome in 1907 ushered color into photography and excited artists at the time. But then something strange happened: they recoiled from color, feeling it was too similar to the way we see the world. If the burgeoning medium of photography couldn't provide something different than what each of us could see using our own eyes, what was it good for? Color: American Photography Transformed tracks the curious history of color in American photography and is a sumptuous beauty to hold in the hand, with images from Walker Evans, Irving Penn and Ansel Adams, among many others. -Kirkus

Author Information

A leading curator in the field of fine art photography, Rohrbach is senior curator of photographs at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. He coedited the collection of essays Reframing the New Topographics, and his other publications include ""Time in New England: Creating a Usable Past,"" in Paul Strand: Essays on His Life and Work; Eliot Porter: The Color of Wildness; Regarding the Land: Robert Glenn Ketchum and the Legacy of Eliot Porter; and Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke.

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