[Leica] More on Color

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

Well, I'll be darned, I *DID* diss color photography.

A bit of redress, in that case:

I do think that in general, color photography is insipid and pedestrian;
at worst, a mere record, at best, decorative. Who was it who said that
you can have color or value, but not both? Cezanne? In any case, color
distracts: it masks form, competes with value (by value I mean
light-and-dark), and overpowers meaning.

But there are of course many exceptions. Nature photography is probably
the most important genre, out of several such, that absolutely depends
upon color for the transmission of information.

Artistically, the situation is a bit rockier. I would say that for me,
as a critic, the general problem has been that as color photography
gained hegemony, photographers almost immediately got distracted from
form and meaning and started simply portraying pretty colors. It's had a
highly trivializing effect on the course of the art. A radical case
might even be made that photography as an art form depended on its
temporary isolation from the fundamental distraction of color, which
encouraged photographers to look at form and meaning apart from the mere
eye-candy of prettiness. But that's an argument for another day.

As far as evaluating existing color work, the situation is happier. As
with any art, sensitive and talented artists can overcome, or work
within, virtually any set of contrictions, to produce meaningful and
effective work. With color, the main issue is that each technique has
been fairly limited in its technical controls and hence its expressive
potential. Therefore, the litmus test is the appropriateness of the
technique to the expressive purpose.

There are indeed a number of intriguing and attractive color techniques.
The most common is real Kodachrome, by which I mean the beautiful,
low-contrast, "ASA" 25-speed stuff of the second or third (i.e., mature)
product iteration, not the faster later variants. To name two masters of
it, Sam Abell has done several books, and of course Ernst Haas created
one of the great bodies of work made using Kodachrome (and Kodachrome
demonstrably influenced Haas in return: we all know how he ended up
accomodating its slow speed!)

By far the most controllable process until recently has been dye
transfer, and dye transfer accounts for most of the most beautiful color
work I've ever seen. Of course, Ctein has said (quoting somebody else? I
don't know offhand), "one lifetime is not long enough to both learn how
to be a good photographer AND learn how to be a master dye transfer
printer." The difficulty of the process has meant that only a few people
practice it, limiting its influence and limiting accomplishment within
it.

[Aside to photograph collectors: Ctein's own dye transfer prints are a
raging bargain; at $500 for a 16x20 last I checked, it's a great way to
own an example of this esoteric process, and he has some stunning
photographs. Dyes will only get more valuable: Kodak has stopped making
the basic materials, the number of master printers is steadily
shrinking, and examples of the process are inherently rare and getting
more so.]

I have in my library an original book by Paul Outerbridge with tipped-in
examples of his color carbro work. John Szarkowski loathes carbro,
calling it "sickly," but I think it serves Outerbridge's work.
Incidentally, much of that work was destroyed by his widow after his
death--thoroughly conventional bourgeois, she was horrified by his nudes
and various perversions, and sought to "protect his reputation." Based
on what little has survived, she is certainly guilty of having destroyed
one of the major and most important bodies of work in the history of
color photography.

Another body of color work that was unfortunately lost was all of Helen
Levitt's early color work in Kodachrome: she was asked to make a
presentation at a NYC museum (MoMA? I'd have to check my notes), and had
the best slides distilling several years' worth of work in several slide
carousels. Walking home with the work in a grocery bag, she was robbed
on the street. Despite offers of rewards, broadcasts for helps from the
entire arts community, and weeks' worth of searching the area, the
missing work was never found. It was several decades before she returned
to working with color.

In my view, by far the greatest tragedy in the altogether dispiriting
history of the color processes has been the persistent tendency of Kodak
and the other manufacturers to choose the easy, ephemeral, and cheap
processes over the stable and good ones. The most painful example of
this was Azochrome, a silver dye-bleach process that Kodak developed in
1941 that got sidetracked by the war. To my mind, this was the most
beautiful color process ever: its colors were very subtle, realistic,
and unexaggerated, allowing value its proper place. Looking at it now,
it almost looks like a cross between black-and-white and color. It is
also magnificently stable in dark storage, much more so than virtually
all of the commercial processes that came after it. The history of
photography, both artistically and archivally, would have been quite
different if Azochrome had become a common commercial process.

I have been very encouraged by what I've seen so far of the digital
processes, and I think it will prove out that digital is, in fact, the
true "coming of age" of color photography as an art form. The reason is
control. It will simply be possible to use color expressively, instead
of learning one or another relatively rigid color process and then
"fitting" expressive work to it. Relatively few artists have even even
begun to explore the expressive potential of digital methods, focusing
instead either on digital's easy of use or its other effects such as
pastiche and image manipulation. But the best of the digital processes,
both colloquial and esoteric, already exceed in technical beauty, and
certainly in potential, most of the common commerical color processes
such as Ektacolor reversal film, Chromogenic prints, and Ilfochrome.

- --Mike