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The Camera and the Rainbow: Color in Photography

Presented by Snite Museum of Art at Snite Museum of Art

August 26-October 14, 2007

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We often divide photography into two categories: color, and traditional black-and-white. The reality, however, is much more complex. There is no totally “realistic” color photographic process; each has its own palette. Some are pastel and dreamy, some feature bright “National Geographic” landscape colors, and others seem harsh and unreal. The same is true in “colorless” monochromatic photography. The prints of the nineteenth century are frequently reproduced in books in monotonous sepia. These early images actually had many shades of color, going back to the first photographs, and ranged from blue through gold, brown, orange, violet, and brick red. What we call “white” is often cream or yellow or ivory. A true “black” usually turns out to be a dark gray, purple, or brown. A group of photographs from the Museum’s permanent collection has been chosen to illustrate a few of the varieties of color in the medium. Nineteenth-century images include landscapes by Timothy O’Sullivan, George Barnard, and an anonymous French photographer. A picture of a Japanese groom by Felice Beato is meticulously hand-colored, and the cyanotype process produces an image in vivid blue. More recent photographs include Joel Meyerowitz’s haunting shot of dusk on the beach at Cape Cod, John Sumner’s portrait of a carnival worker in Georgia, a Joyce Neimanas montage that combines photographs and drawings, and Peter Brown’s homage to hot summer days on the High Plains. We hope that by seeing the original photographs, viewers will begin to see some of the subtleties that are often not discernible in books.