Common Colour

I propose to investigate the role of colour in showing the vitality in the banality of everyday life in America with particular focus on the work of the “new colour” photographers of the 1970s. 

Hot Sauce, William Eggleston

In an effort to explore the above, I have identified the themes below as potential areas of interest to explore further.  These themes could then be further supported and augmented by primary research in the form of a series of photographic projects investigating the applications of colour on everyday subject matter.

Acceptance. Investigate the change of attitude towards the use of colour in photography in the 1970s. Although invented in 1907, it took until the 1970s for colour photography to be accepted seriously into the photographic world. 

Black & White are the colours of photography – Robert Frank

Once upon a time there were jobs, Robert Frank, 1955

What were the underlying barriers to its acceptance? What was the tipping point (or points) that leads to its acceptance? What was the role of art movements such as abstract expressionism and pop-art, in its renaissance?

Advocates. William Eggleston was the first proponent of colour photography to be truly accepted by the art world when John Szarkowski showed his work at MOMA in 1976. The publication, William Eggleston's Guide, in which Szarkowski called Eggleston's photographs "perfect," focus on everyday, umdane and trivial subjects.

William Eggleston's Guide, 1976

Perfect? Perfectly banal, maybe…perfectly boring, certainly – Hilton Kramer, New York art critic 

The research aims to focus on Eggleston’s work as well as the other  “new color” photographers of the 70s and 80s such as Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld.

Ginger Shore, Stephen Shore, 1977

Uncommon Places, Stephen Shore, 1982

Uncommon Places, Stephen Shore, 1982

Joel Sternfeld

Application. What tangible attributes does colour bring to a photo (life, focus, emphasis, energy etc.)? What were the various processes used and why? (e.g. Eggleston’s discovery of the dye-transfer process in 1973) What meaning (psychological) can be attributed to the use of colour in photography?

Subject. What effect did the application of colour have on the representation of daily life in America?  How did it change the perception of everyday life in America? 

William Eggleston

Los Alamos

Los Alamos is a collection of images taken by William Eggleston between 1965 and 1974 as he traveled through Southern and Western America.  The book, first published in 2003 to accompany an exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Germany, presents a selection of prints from a collection of some 2,200 negatives produced by Eggleston during this period.

Los Alamos provides us with further evidence of Eggleston innate attentiveness in capturing the life of the ordinary.  He photographed everyday life, objects and environments, recording them in their richness and unadorned states. 

These images of life never feel like they are studies but more like extended glances into the familiar.  The mundane and ordinary subject matter make the images accessible and understandable.  We’ve seen these things, these people before but maybe not like this. 

Untitled, 1965

This accessibility is further enhanced by the lack of depth and narrow perspective used by Eggleston.  He provides us with a human viewpoint. They are glimpses that we may have made ourselves but now we question whether we really ever saw what was there.  He reminds us that the ordinary is not so ordinary and that there is much vibrancy in the everyday.

Untitled, 1971 

It is this vibrancy and intensity that sets these images apart.  And it is Eggleston’s use of colour that achieves this.  Eggleston used colour at a time when it was only considered suitable for amateur photos or glossy commercial advertisements. It was at a time when "professional" photographers only took pictures in black-and-white. 

Black & White are the colours of photography – Robert Frank

Colour photography allowed Eggleston to use and control colour like a painter may.  Photography, for him, was always an extension of his love for the visual arts.  In 1973 Eggleston had discovered the now out-dated dye-transfer process.  It was a process predominantly used in the advertising industry during the 50s and 60s. The process resulted in giving specific colour’s enhanced saturation and increased intensity. With colour photography and his new found process Eggleston now had the tools to bring the ordinary and mundane to life. 

He shoots like a shutterbug and executes like a painter – Peter Schjeldahl

Eggleston draws us into his frames with his focused, targeted use of primary colour.  We are never left in doubt what or whom the subject of the photo is.  

 

Untitled [and] Untitled

The sky is used often like a curtain backdrop helping to contrast the show in front.  The intensity of the blue providing us with a frame for his subject matter.

Untitled, 1971

The intensity of Eggleton’s colours are rarely matched by the intensity of life underneath.  There are always signs of deterioration of wear and tear, whether it is a car, a sign, a face.  We are reminded of the fragility of ordinary life.  There are always cracks on the surface but maybe we sometime don’t notice them.  Eggleston ensures that we never bore of the mundane and the ordinary and reminds us that is such vibrancy and intensity to what we see everyday.

Untitled, 1965-1968

Chronologies

Published in 2005, Chronologies draws from a period of some thirty years, from 1975 to 2003, in the career of the American landscape photographer Richard Misrach.  The book collects 125 images re-sequenced into the chronological order.  Representing an explorative study, rather than an anthology or retrospective, the collection reveals a progression of idea, themes and process over a period of 30 years.

"White Man Contemplating Pyramids", Egypt, 1991 [and] "Untitled" On the Beach Series, 2004

Photos are now re-presented out of their original context as a collection of work in themselves. Previously sequenced images are now reorganised into a ”stream of consciousness” providing insight into Misrach’s thinking and evolution as a photographer.  Throughout the journey we see common threads emerge; in subject matter and in composition. Formal and conceptual connections surface as his work weaves in and out of different themes.  There is a sense that we are on a journey of discovery and its not just for our benefit. 

"Train Tracks", 1984 [and] "Tracks", 1989

The book is principally about time.  It reinforces the importance of time within Misrach’s frames while also highlighting its role as the revealer of new meanings and unexpected relationships as the frames become re-arranged consecutively over a 30 year span.  Furthermore, the book becomes a timepiece in itself with every turn of the page representing progression.

Cameras are clocks for seeing -  Roland Barthes

It is the Salton Sea series of photographs that he illustrate so vividly the fragility of our habitation over time. A decade of flooding was caused at this artificial lake in the late 1970s when control of the water levels were lost.  There exists a blurring of the horizon line in Misrach's images of the disaster.  Man made objects rest perilously between the sea and the sky as they are slowly swallowed up.  The objects sit like melting ice caps whose presence will slowly be erased.

"Flooded Snack Bar",  "Submerged Trailer", Salton Sea, 1983

Throughout the work we see Misrach’s ongoing concern with the landscape and humanity’s interaction with it.  He continually reminds us of our subservient role to the forces of nature.   The Salton Sea and Oakland fire series of photos, both representing environmental disasters shot eight years apart, are reminders to our transient existence. Swimming pools remain as traces of our being.

"Diving Board", Salton Sea, 1983 [and] "Swimming Pool", Oakland, 1991

Nobody else has made such a sustained political enquiry into our maltreatment of the wilderness in a vocabulary of such exquisite beauty.—Francis Hodgson

The book begins with a cactus taken from his first series of photos (A Photographic Book) in 1975 and concludes with images from his “On the Beach” series (2003).  The timelessness in the first is replaced with the endlessness of nature in the last. Feelings of privacy are replaced with that of isolation. We are but dots in the ocean. Time has erased the comforting horizon, evident in most of Misrach's work to that date, and replaced it with a celestial view point highlighting our insignificance in the landscape.  

"Ocotillo", 1975 [and] "Untitled", 2005

REFERENCES

http://seesawmagazine.com/misrachpages/misrach_interview.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/arts/design/19geft.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Richard-Misrach#cite_note-Misrach.2C_Richard-2