Capturing the world in color was one of photography’s greatest aspirations from the very beginnings of the medium. When color photography became a reality with the introduction of the Autochrome in 1907, prominent photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz were overjoyed. But they quickly came to reject color photography as too aligned with human sight. It took decades for artists to come to understand the creative potential of color, and only in 1976, when John Szarkowski showed William Eggleston’s photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, did the art world embrace color. By accepting color’s flexibility and emotional transcendence, Szarkowski and Eggleston transformed photography, giving the medium equal artistic stature with painting, but also initiating its demise as an independent art.
The catalogue of a major exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, which holds one of the premier collections of American photography, Color tells, for the first time, the fascinating story of color’s integration into American fine art photography and how its acceptance revolutionized the practice of art. Tracing the development of color photography from the first color photograph in 1851 to digital photography, John Rohrbach describes photographers’ initial rejection of color, their decades-long debates over what color brings to photography, and how their gradual acceptance of color released photography from its status as a second-tier art form. He shows how this absorption of color instigated wide acceptance of a fundamentally new definition of photography, one that blends photography’s documentary foundations with the creative flexibility of painting. Sylvie Pénichon offers a succinct survey of the technological advances that made color in photography a reality and have since marked its multifaceted development. These texts, illuminated by seventy-five full-page plates and more than eighty illustrations, make this book a groundbreaking contribution to photographic studies.

Color: American Photography Transformed (The William and Bettye Nowlin Series in Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere)

Arts & Photography

Rohrbach, John

Pénichon, Sylvie

Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Photography & Video

University of Texas Press

Scott Gentling (1942-2011) and Stuart Gentling (1942-2006) were brothers and lifelong collaborators whose artistic interests spanned centuries and crossed continents. Born in Minnesota, they moved to Fort Worth, Texas, in 1947. With the exception of a period of academic and professional studies in the 1960s that included time spent at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, they lived and worked together in Fort Worth until their deaths. The brothers drew strong regional support and patronage for their work--especially their painted portraits--that provided them with the means to produce more experimental work rooted in historicism and hyperrealism. Drawing from their personal passions and interests, the Gentlings painted everything from still lifes of antique costumes to posed portraiture to depictions of Aztec culture and of the natural world. Given their prodigious, decades-long creative output, why did the brothers not achieve the recognition their art warranted during their lifetimes? Nearly every author in this volume raises this question. In fact, the Gentlings dodged opportunities for greater national attention, and their gallery representatives walked a frustrating line, struggling with the artists to advance their reputation and exposure. What is never in question is the authenticity of their work. Devoted to history as a platform for expression, the Gentlings sought knowledge of the subjects they explored in their art with the tenacity and thoroughness of experts, weaving together an activism born from research with their rich imaginations and the veracity of work in the field. The essays and plates within these covers illuminate the careers of Scott and Stuart Gentling and attest to their contributions to American creative achievement.

Imagined Realism: Scott and Stuart Gentling

History & Criticism

Amon Carter Museum

Featuring touchstones of modernist art and showcasing many never-before-published works by American icons. 
American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection recontextualizes touchstones of American art and showcases never-before-published works by Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Alma Thomas, among others. 
For the first time, Charles Butt—CEO of the H-E-B supermarket chain—shares his passion for modernist art in an exhibition that will travel across Texas from 2025 through 2027 and in this accompanying catalogue. The more than eighty paintings and watercolors from the first eighty years of the twentieth century reveal an influential Texan’s personal vision of the creativity of modern American art. The collection includes both intimate figural scenes and dynamic landscape paintings, and illuminates various approaches to representing and interpreting this country’s land and seas. With color plates and essays by curator Shirley Reece-Hughes and art historian Erika Doss, as well as an interview with Butt by the Carter’s director, Andrew J. Walker, American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection offers a rare glimpse of an unparalleled collection of American imagination.

American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Carter Handbook

Kristen Gaylord

Spencer Wigmore

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Books by Amon Carter Museum of American Art