“Starburst: Color Photography In America 1970–1980″
Black and white photography is such a relic of another age that it is hard to imagine, as recently as the 1970s, the art world’s hostility to color. William Eggleston’s Color Photographs, for example, the first one-man show of color work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, was considered the worst exhibit of the year. Hilton Kramer repudiated John Szarkowski, the museum’s curator of photography, for throwing caution to the wind when he spoke of Eggleston’s work as “perfect.” “Perfect?” Kramer wrote in The New York Times. “Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.” Of course Eggleston would become one of the most influential photographers of the era.
