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

Richard Avedon's In the American West is widely regarded as a landmark project in photographic history and a definitive expression of the power of photographic art. First published by Abrams in 1985 in conjunction with an exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the book is being reissued to accompany a 20th-anniversary re-showing of the exhibition at the same museum. Avedon, who died in 2004, was the greatest American photographer of his generation. For In the American West, he traveled throughout five years, meeting and photographing the plain people of the West: ranch workers, roustabouts, bar girls, drifters, and gamblers. The resulting book includes 120 exquisitely printed black-and-white photographs, an essay by Avedon on his working methods and portrait philosophy, a journal of the project by Laura Wilson, and a new foreword by John Rohrbach. The reissuing of this legendary book, out of print for more than a decade, is a major event in the photography world.

In The American West

Wilson, Laura

Individual Artists

Harry N.Abrams, Inc.

Eliot Porter made his first color photograph in 1939, the year he resigned from teaching and research to pursue photography as a career. Over the next fifty years, his work was exhibited widely and he produced more than two dozen books of his photographs. He became a passionate ambassador for environmental causes and, through his images, set the standard for color landscape photography and inspired generations of photographers to come. Robert Glenn Ketchum counts himself among them. Ketchum is among the leading contemporary photographers of the American landscape. His many books use fine art color photography to address environmental issues. The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, is a museum of American art. It houses one of the most important collections of photography in the country, including Eliot Porter's archives, which the artist bequeathed to the museum upon his death in 1990. The museum is also a repository of Ketchum's work, and Regarding the Land marks the first time that photographs by these two artists have been brought together into one volume. Regarding the Land: Robert Glenn Ketchum and the Legacy of Eliot Porter has eighty-eight color and duotone plates. The book also includes chronologies of both artists and lists their publications and major exhibitions.

Regarding the Land: Robert Glenn Ketchum And the Legacy of Eliot Porter

Ketchum, Robert Glenn

Amon Carter Museum

Eliot Porter: The Color of Wildness is the first in-depth retrospective of Porter's work. Over the course of his long career, Porter has photographed familiar landscapes, like the coast of Maine where he spent childhood summers, as well as well as strange, remote places like the Galapagos Islands. With the success of his Sierra Club publication In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, Selections and Photographs by Eliot Porter (1962), Porter became an ambassador for environmental causes. His ecological interests led to a fascination with humanity's cultural roots. An essay by curator John Rohrbach addresses Porter's break with the classical techniques of the master Modernists Paul Strand and Ansel Adams. An essay by Porter's son Jonathan, who often accompanied his father on photographic expeditions, discusses Porter's lifelong love of the natural world, his working methods, and his interests outside of photography. Rebecca Solnit's essay positions Porter's work within the environmental movement and the political climate of the 1960s. “[Porter's images] ... are secure in the history of the medium and contribute to the highest standards and achievements of the art.” --Ansel Adams

The Color of Wildness: A Retrospective, 1936-1985

Porter, Jonathan

Aperture

Wind, water, and molten rock constantly tear apart and resculpt the natural world we live in, and people have always struggled to create structures that will permanently establish their existence on the land. Frank Golhke has committed his camera lens to documenting that fraught relationship between people and place, and this retrospective collection of his work by John Rohrbach reveals how people carve out their living spaces in the face of constant natural disruption. An acclaimed master of landscape photography, Golhke explores in Accommodating Nature how people configure the places where they live, work, and commune, both on an everyday level and in the aftermath of catastrophic destruction. Whether a ranch house anchored fast on an endless Texas plain, the shattered buildings and whipped trees left by a category 5 tornado, or the jagged cliffs of ash and rock created by the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens, the photographs unearth the ways in which new homes and lives emerge from the fragments of the old. Thought-provoking essays by Rebecca Solnit, Frank Gohlke, and John Rohrbach expand upon the issues raised by the images, contemplating the complexities of human and cultural geography and the relationships we have with our respective place. An arresting and vibrant visual essay combining magnificent vistas with intimate emotional detail, Accommodating Nature exposes the intricate threads that bind our lives to the land surrounding us.

Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke

Center for American Places

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