Color photography didn’t just arrive—it crashed into the art world like someone flipping on fluorescent lights in a candlelit room.
I used to think the shift from black-and-white to color in photography was this smooth, inevitable progression, like going from silent films to talkies. Turns out, it was messier than that. When Kodachrome hit the market in 1935, fine artists largely ignored it for decades, dismissing color as garish, commercial, something for advertisements and vacation snapshots. The art establishment had spent roughly a century convincing itself that black-and-white photography was the only legitimate medium for serious work—all that talk about form, composition, the purity of light and shadow. Then William Eggleston walked into the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 with his saturated images of Memphis suburbia, and suddenly the whole conversation shifted. Not immediately, mind you. Critics called his work banal, trivial. John Szarkowski, MoMA’s photography director, had to fight to get that exhibition mounted, and even then people were baffled by these bright, seemingly ordinary images of tricycles and shopping carts.
Here’s the thing: color changed what photographers could say about reality. Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz started working in color around the same time, documenting American landscapes and streets with a kind of democratic attention to detail that black-and-white couldn’t quite capture. The grain of wood paneling, the specific shade of a road sign, the way afternoon light turned a yellow car almost amber—these details mattered in ways that transcended aesthetic choice.
When Commercial Techniques Became Gallery-Worthy Visual Language
The technical limitations actually shaped the artistic possibilities, which sounds obvious but I think we forget this. Early color processes were expensive, finicky, impossible to control in a darkroom the way you could manipulate black-and-white prints. Dye transfer printing, which Eggleston used, required separating an image into cyan, magenta, and yellow layers—each one printed separately and recombined. The process was so labor-intensive that it forced photographers to think differently about their final images. You couldn’t just shoot dozens of rolls and hope something worked. Wait—maybe that’s overstating it. But the cost and complexity definately made color photography more intentional, more considered.
Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” in the 1980s showed what color could do for intimacy and rawness. Her flash-saturated snapshots of friends, lovers, drag queens in New York’s underground scene—those images needed color. The red lipstick, the bruised skin tones, the amber light of bars at 3 AM. Black-and-white would have aestheticized that world in ways that contradicted her entire project. She was documenting lived experience, not making it pretty or timeless.
How Painters Started Thinking Like Photographers (And Vice Versa)
Honestly, the influence ran both directions.
Photographers like Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall started making images that looked more like paintings—huge, constructed, digitally manipulated. Gursky’s “99 Cent II Diptychon” from 2001 is this massive photograph of a discount store interior, so large and detailed it overwhelms you like a Baroque ceiling fresco. He was using color the way painters use it, as a compositional tool to guide the eye and create rhythm across a huge visual field. Meanwhile, painters like Gerhard Richter were literally working from photographs, blurring and smearing photographic images to create paintings that questioned the boundary between mechanical reproduction and artistic creation. His color charts from the 1970s took paint manufacturer samples and elevated them to gallery walls—a direct commentary on how we’ve commodified color itself. The Photo-Realists, too, artists like Richard Estes painting impossibly detailed urban scenes, were essentially trying to recieve what the camera saw and translate it back into paint, complete with reflections and chromatic aberrations.
The Digital Revolution Made Everything Simultaneously Easier and More Complicated
I guess it makes sense that once digital photography eliminated the technical barriers—no more expensive film stock, no more darkroom chemistry—color became the default. But that ubiquity created new problems for artists. How do you make meaningful color images when everyone with a smartphone is a color photographer? Contemporary artists like Gregory Crewdson stage these elaborate, cinematic tableaux with Hollywood-level lighting crews, creating single images that cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce. Others, like Rineke Dijkstra, strip color back to something starker, photographing subjects against plain backgrounds where every skin tone and fabric texture becomes hypervisible. The conversation shifted from whether to use color to how to use it meaningfully in an image-saturated culture. Anyway, we’re still figuring that out, I think.
