Sawhill Ponds, Late Fall #8. Boulder, Colorado, 2013
No, this post isn’t about Megyn Kelly at Fox News and her “white Santa comments”. Lets stick to photography today, shall we?It may be hard to believe, but when color photography started to become accessible to the average Jane and Joe with a camera (roughly, 1930s into the 1960s), the idea of color in a photograph was not without its bandstand of critics.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: “Photography in color? It is something indigestible, the negation of all photography’s three-dimensional values.”
When William Eggleston had his famous color photography exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Ansel Adams was quick to question how such work had come to be admitted and hung on such hallowed walls.
Some even went all the way over the cliff and said that photography in color was “less real”. Imagine that! Does that mean that, before the 1930s or so, the world itself, along with all of its actors, existed and performed only in black and white? An interesting concept, this.
Some dates:
–1861: First color photograph
–1935: Kodachrome process “developed” (sic)
–1940s: Ektachrome comes on line
–1963: First instant color film by Polaroid, Polacolor
–1976: William Eggleston’s Guide, the first major color photography exhibit at the MoMA
Could it be that we learned to “see” photographs in black and white first then, when color came out, it seemed strange and unnatural?
Ironically, today, most of the photography I see exhibited is in color, and black and white has become the purvey of a minority–the street photographers, the Ansel Adams throwbacks, and that oddball fine art photographer in the loft apartment in the hippie district.
Hmmm…or is that really true?
Sawhill Ponds, Late Fall #8. Boulder, Colorado, 2013
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