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

William Klein's New York

In 1954 William Klein returned to New York from his adopted country France and began to photograph it in a “new way”.  He was an American returning home for eight months after spending six years in Europe and as such was like a foreigner arriving to a new land.  This alienation from the streets and the people he grew up with allowed him to reassess them as an outsider while his familiarity allowed him to relate to them as a local.

'I was a make believe ethnographer: treating new yorkers like an explorer would treat zulus - searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography.'

William Klein, Pepsi and Moves, Harlem, New York, 1955

Klein was returning as an artist using photography as his medium and not just a photographer looking to art for inspiration.  The work was coarse, raw and full of energy.  It resonated with the spontaneity and immediacy that American art was showing at the time. Its primitive and gestural characteristics echoing the “action paintings” of Jackson Pollock.

Klein's presence was evident in all his images.  His physical presence felt through his engagement with his subjects, his vivid technique and style or simply through the angle he would hold the camera.  It was action photography. His images lunged and arrested sometimes feeling like stills ripped from a movie reel and re-presented in their raw state.

William Klein, Vertical Diamonds 1953 (Abstract Art)

Jackson Pollock at work, 1950

Klein rejected conformity.  His shots were often blurred or out of focus. He used fast film and wide angles.  He was transferring abstract art techniques to the real life streets of New York.  He applied a visual filter of movement, blur and haziness to the exuberance of life on the street and in doing so amplified its inherent intensity.

Candy Store, William Klein, New York, 1955

Without any formal photographic training Klein had now created his own style. His technique and approach shocked the photography world.  He had captured life on the streets like no other photographer before.  The subjects were always engaged and engaging. Klein wasn’t capturing life as it went by but was capturing life as it unfolded and wrapping it up in its own aura of visual energy.  Klein then added an extra layer of vitality to every frame through his experimental techniques with flash, blur, close-ups, wide-angle, grab shots, abstraction, noise, and grainy textural qualities.

St. Patricks' Day, 5th Avenue, William Klein, 1955

The city Klein portrays was one of multicultural and social dynamism.  There was little of today's skepticism in the faces of its subjects. The people and the streets of New York were willing and active participants in Klein's portrayal. He showed the underlying exuberance of the city and its sense of fun.  Where there was evidence of darkness there was never threat or menace.  Even his most disturbing and iconic photo from the series turns out to be theatre.

"...it's fake violence, a parody. I asked the boy to point the gun at me and then look tough. He did, and then we both laughed…"

Gun #1, William Klein, New York, 1955

Along with Robert Frank's book The Americans (1958), Klein's New York (1955) would eventually become recognised as one of the the most ground breaking works on street photography in America. Both men took a real, honest and sometimes harsh look at life while also rebelling against the traditions of aesthetic formality prevalent in photography to that date. Frank's images were more distant and less violent than Klein's. They both showed America as it had never been shown before but it was Klein that pushed more aggressively the filter through which we saw this "new" America.

Elevator, Miami Beach, Robert Frank, 1955

In Klein’s New York life stopped for no-one.  There was no time to focus, no time to stop and look…just time to glimpse or catch the world as it went by. It was instinctive and in your face.

lsa Maxwell’s Toy Ball, William Klein, New York, 1955

References

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/06/theory-indecisive-moment-frank-klein.html
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/K/klein/klein_articles2.html