Maybe It's the Color

Almost all photography today is in color. If, as has been suggested, photography is presently in a period of decline - qualitatively, not commercially - is there any connection between that circumstance and the ubiquity of color?

Good question. The answer, I think, is in the nature of color, in how color is used in photographs.

Color, first and foremost, is an expressive element, a formal element, like line, or light, or shape, or space.

Here, William Eggleston almost literally transmutes light into color.


William Eggleston, Red Ceiling, Greenwood Miss. 1973 . Copyright W. Eggleston

Here, Stephen Shore uses color to link forms and define space.


Stephen Shore, US 10,Post Falls, Id. 1974 . Copyright Stephen Shore

Here, Wijnanda Deroo's color amplifies light and form and makes them even more expressive.


Wijnanda Deroo, Cafe Merino, Chihuahua, Mexico, 2001
Copyright Wijnanda Deroo.

But sometimes color is used, not as a formal element, but for its descriptive qualities. Because most of us see in color, a color photograph may be understood as more realistic than one without color. As Stephen Shore points out in The Nature of Photographs: "Color ... adds a new level of descriptive information and transparency to the image. It is more transparent because one is stopped less by the surface - color is more like how we see."

That's not entirely correct, though. It isn't the surface of a black and white photograph that impedes the viewer, it's the abstraction, the emphasis of the formal. At the same time it makes the photograph "more like how we see," color makes it less abstract. This can be risky. Sometimes even a slight increase in descriptive information - with its concomitant reduction in abstraction - is too much for a photograph.

This picture by Robert Adams, for example, has good enough bones to survive almost anything, including rendition in color (if you can imagine it).


Robert Adams, Mobile Home, Colorado Springs, CO, 1972
Copyright Robert Adams

But this one by Henry Wessel does not. In black and white, it might have just enough formal interest to hold its own. In color, it is merely pretty.


Henry Wessel, Real Estate Photo No. 91517, 1991. Copyright H. Wessel

And this is true of a lot of work being done today. Reliant primarily on subject, without much formal strength, such pictures are easily tipped, by their quotidian color, into banality.

(Wessel's excellent black and white work, recently on display at SFMOMA, may also be seen at Rena Bransten.)