The forties, in color

Am I the only one who still finds older color photographs particularly fascinating? Especially those predating the postwar boom in color snapshooting -- like a glimpse into a world that on some unshakeable level still seems black & white.

Today's NY Times echoes this sentiment:

Americans are accustomed to looking at the Depression in black and white. But a more vibrant nation appears in an exhibition of 70 color photographs that opens Thursday at the Library of Congress . . .

Culled from a collection of little-known color images made by photographers from the federal Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information, the prints bring alive everyday rural life between 1939 and 1943.

The total hoard includes some 1600 pictures, but have only recently received much attention despite having resided in the Library of Congress since 1946 (a book, Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43, upon which the exhibition was based, came out last year). As the library's curator for prints and photographs notes, "There were questions for years about whether color photography was truly art" . . . "They were not taken as seriously as black-and-white images." Not just as art, but as documentation as well. I was advised in graduate school to take pictures in black & white as well as color slides -- advice that I largely ignored after realizing that one can make black & white images from color, but not vice versa (and after gaining an appreciation from my own grad student travels of how much a had missed in learning about buildings and sculpture with color omitted).

Nothing at the Library of Congress exhibitions page as of yet, though there is mention of the preview party.

Posted by David on September 5, 2005 8:48 AM