Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980

by Kevin Moore, James Crump (Contributor), Leo Rubinfien (Contributor)

It is hard to imagine today that the artistic value of color photography was once questioned and controversial, even as recently as the 1980s. William Eggleston's watershed exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976, generated plenty of scorn and confusion, as spectators struggled to accept his seemingly ordinary-looking color images of Southern life as art. Early photographs by Stephen Shore, Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz and others received similarly hostile or ambivalent reviews. Color photography also had opponents within photography, most notoriously in Henri Cartier-Bresson. But as color processes both diversified and grew more sophisticated, and further approaches to the medium developed, the floodgates were opened wide. Starburst examines the first great practitioners of artistic color photography in the United Eggleston, Shore, Levitt, Meyerowitz, plus Joel Sternfeld, William Christenberry, John Divola, Mitch Epstein, Jan Groover, Robert Heinecken, Barbara Kasten, Les Krims, Richard Misrach, John Pfahl, Leo Rubinfien, Neal Slavin, Eve Sonneman and many more. Grounded in reviews of sources from the 1970s, and with an abundance of images, this survey makes a thorough assessment of this paradigm shift in the history of art photography.

Genres: Photography, Art

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2010

Reviews

[Davy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The essays are fabulous. Very compelling, very insightful. Even comprehensive. And the featured artists are, for the most part, well-chosen. But the selected images form a peculiar and idiosyncratic series. The story they tell is a little bit choppy and in some cases misleading and in that way, they fail to measure up to the words they follow.

[Jennifer Didik · Rating 5 out of 5]

thank you, princeton art museum, for taking on this exhibit.