"When color was new vintage photographs from around the 1970s" Exhibiiotn

Julie Saul Gallery

poster for "When color was new vintage photographs from around the 1970s" Exhibiiotn

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The Julie Saul Gallery presents announce our summer exhibition of color work made during and around the 1970s, "when color was new." The selection is comprised of 40 works by 20 photographers ranging from the straight street or snapshot aesthetic of Helen Levitt, William Eggleston, and Joel Meyerowitz to more conceptually based work of contemporaries Boyd Webb, John Pfahl, Dan Graham and Luigi Ghirri. Hybrids exist as well as in the straight yet formally driven compositions of Jan Groover and David Hockney. The diaristic quality of the snapshot aesthetic, which is such a standard feature of art school production, is beautifully demonstrated by the prints of Stephen Shore.

Self proclaimed art photographers have experimented with the use of color from the mediums' early days, as seen in the autochromes of Edward Steichen. Some examples of color work made prior to the 1970s are featured in the show to demonstrate the "pre-history" of color art photography, especially as used by cross-over commercial/art practioners Paul Outerbridge Jr, Arthur Seigel and Harry Callahan.
It was only with the imprimatur given by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 with his controversial exhibition of William Eggleston's Guide, that color became generally accepted within the art canon. The trickle down effect took hold almost immediately within institutions and art schools- and by the mid-1980s color was the most widely used medium in art photography and today it is ubiquitous.

Many mediums were evident within the practice of color photography from its earliest days. The stunning intensity of the color carbro prints of Outerbridge stand out in contrast to the subtle tonalities of even the most vibrant chromogenic prints. The selection includes beautiful examples of the nearly extinct medium of dye transer prints as seen in the work of Meyerowitz, William Christenberry and Joel Sternfeld. In several instances, the exhibition includes both chromogenic prints and dye transfers by the same photographer, enabling one to see the different qualities of the two mediums. The short-lived popularity of the SX-70 Polaroid gave rise to the use of color by Walker Evans- who had previously vowed his lack of interest in color. Australian photographer Boyd Webb made stunning use of the powerful Cibachrome print in his pop still lifes.

Altogether, this group of images, which range from still life to landscape and street photography demonstrate a moment when there was novelty and even shock in the use of color in an art context- while today it certainly represents the norm. Almost all of the prints in the exhibition were made at or around the time of the negative, allowing us to reflect on the historical appearance of color print, which today are almost universally printed digitally.
An illustrated catalog with an essay by Linda Yablonsky is available.

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