Re: [Leica] More on Color

["Mike Durling" <durling@widomaker.com>]

This is a little off of Mike's original post, and maybe this has been
covered here.  If you want a good example of the difference between color
and black and white in a photojournalism situation check out the portfolios
of Peter and David Turnley in the "Digital Journalist"
http://dirckhalstead.org/contents.html  Each did an excellent series of work
on the refugees from Kosovo.  Peter worked in color, David in black and
white.  Both photographer's pictures are extremely powerful but for
different reasons.  David's black and white photos have a timeless,
placeless quality.  They are the story of refugees throughout history.
Peter's color pictures have a much more immediate impact.  These people look
like they could be from West Virginia!  I don't know which I like better but
it shows that in the right hands either medium can be a powerful
storytelling tool.

Mike D

- -----Original Message-----
From: Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>
To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us <leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
Date: Sunday, November 28, 1999 1:02 PM
Subject: [Leica] More on Color


>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
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