© Stephen Shore, South of Klamath Falls, U.S. 97, Oregon, July 21, 1973 from Uncommon Places

The colors unique to color photography produced what once seemed insurmountable problems. Color film’s exaggeration of subject hue and the concurrent difficulty of formally organizing the visible world’s raucous color combinations gave the medium an aura of vulgarity.

Walker Evans deemed color a “vulgar” medium and stated that many “color photographers confuse color with noise” and that they “(blow) you down with screeching hues alone…a bebop of electric blues, furious reds and poison greens.”

– from The New Color Photography by Sally Eauclaire

Beginning in the 1970’s, there was a heightened level of critical discussion about the role and use of color in photography, including the writing of John Szarkowski (Introduction to William Eggleston’s Guide, 1976), as well as an an extensive survey and critical analysis by Sally Eauclaire with The New Color Photography (1981) and American Independents (1989).

This firmly established a critical discourse in which color photography’s intrinsic quality was due to the photographers’ thorough understanding and use of a full color spectrum and its endless possibilities of subtle gradation and transition.

© Jan Groover, Untitled, 1978

Color photography was no longer discussed and considered as being “about color” – a critical catch phrase frequently used to justify many photographs in which concentrations of primary or secondary hues screech for attention. Rather, the new color photographers consider color’s role in a formal, descriptive and symbolic totality.

– from The New Color Photography by Sally Eauclaire

© Joel Meyerowitz, Provincetown, 1976

Color is not a separate issue, but rather as though the world itself existed in color, as though the blue and the sky were the same thing.

An additional possibility in considering how to utilize color is the compositional tension that can be created to articulate photographic meaning through the descriptive nature of color in revealing details as well as the color of light to imply mood and psychological tension.

© Helen Levitt, New York, 1980