The introduction of color film to the consumer market—Kodachrome in 1935 and Ektachrome in 1946—spurred a passionate debate among professionals and amateurs alike. While color transparencies and prints could be glorious in their original form, early reproductions in print were generally wretched, especially in mass market photo magazines.
Those same magazines willingly stirred debate about the merits of color vs black-and-white. Modern Photography was at the forefront of the charge; writing in the May 1951 issue, Aspen-based Ferenc Berko wrote about “hunting pattern subjects” in both color and black-and-white. [1]
Ferenc Berko: Aspen Texture Series, 1948/49.
At the Aspen Institute’s inaugural design conference later that year, Berko presented a set of his color abstractions. Designers, he opined, were “way ahead of photographers and museum curators in their recognition of what color photography should be like.” But at the “Aspen Golden Days” photography conference four months later, Eastman House curator Beaumont Newhall surprised him; Newhall was so impressed with Berko’s color slides that prior to his presentation he substituted them for Arthur Siegel’s—a decision that pleased Berko no end. [2]
Siegel had been a colleague of Berko at the Chicago Institute of Design, and he was a leading figure in the explorations of color abstraction. Although he believed avidly in the medium, he confessed in a 1952 issue of Modern Photography that, “If the science of color photography is in its adolescence, the aesthetics of color photography is in its infancy.” The following year in the same magazine, Nancy Newhall wrote about Edward Weston’s experiments with Ektachrome sheet film. Her evaluation, which could have applied to the film and images equally, was that, “Color photography today is about where black-and-white was when the daguerreotype was new.” [3]
Edward Weston: Ektachrome experiments. Left, Desert-tanned boots; Right top, Dody; Right bottom, Point Lobos. Rock Pools and Sea Urchins. Published in Modern Photography, December 1953.
Given the rampant consumerism of the American Dream post-war era, it’s no surprise that the advertising industry eagerly adopted color as a means to sell products. In a Modern Photography dialog between photographers Barbara Morgan and Ivan Dmitri, Dmitri trumpeted color’s suitability for selling “cars, more furniture, more services, more anything else [by] men who take constant check of the public pulse to see what catches their eye.”
Morgan spoke for the vast majority of creative photographers working throughout the fifties and sixties when she replied that “Color photography is, I readily agree, in a transitional state today. If the obstacle of processing can be overcome, if the dyes can be improved so that the colors equal or surpass the artist’s pigments, if the colors can be made permanent I shall be happy to work in the medium. In the meantime, I value the integrity of black-and-white and am happy to stay with it.”
Winter Prather: Left, Marge Williams, ca. 1950s; Right, Oil Storage Tanks, ca. 1950s. History Colorado Winter Prather Collection.
In Colorado, as elsewhere, commercial photographers like Winter Prather, James Milmoe, and Syl Labrot shot color for advertising assignments and experimented with color dye-transfer printing as a creative aside. Occasionally they were able to infiltrate the mainstream—Syl Labrot had particular success with color abstractions at MoMA and the Eastman House in the late-fifties and early sixties—but color would only emerge as a fully accredited genre in the seventies when MoMA’s curator of photography, John Szarkowski, championed the work of William Eggleston, a photographer known for his casual “snapshot” studies of the South and the southern social landscape.
Traditionalists’ nerves were rubbed especially raw when Szarkowski cited Eggleston as the individual most responsible for “inventing color photography.” [5] As June’s First Friday column suggests, that honorific has passed down through the decades to the likes of Siegel and Harry Callahan, Ernst Haas and Helen Levitt, Eggleston, and Labrot himself. What is certain is that in today’s digital world, color has transcended even Barbara Morgan’s most extravagant expectations for the medium.
Arthur Siegel: Headlight, 1953. Dye imbibition print, 25.7 x 20.7 cm. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Peabody Fund. 1954. 1229.
1. Ferenc Berko, “Purity in Pattern,” in Modern Photography, May 1951. 88.
2. Quotes from: Karl Steinorth, ed.: “Ferenc Berko: 60 Years of Photography <The Discovering Eye>, Edition Stemmle, 1991.
3. Arthur Siegel, “Creative Color Photography: how to get out of the color slide rut,” in Modern Photography (January 1952), 60; Nancy Newhall, “Weston Color,” in Modern Photography, December 1953. 59.
4. “Is Black & White Better Than Color?”, Modern Photography, July 1952. 52–86.
5. Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (New York: Abbeville Press, 1997), 599. Third edition.
The Colorado Photo History blog is the online presence for “Outside Influence,” a book project by Rupert Jenkins. As always, please leave a comment or a suggestion for future posts, and visit #Colorado Photo History on Instagram and Facebook.
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