When Color Photography Wasn’t Cool

Once upon a time color photography was not cool. It was the cheap trick of fashion magazines and corny advertisements. It required too many chemicals. It was too literal because it showed the world for what it really was.

Most artists and nearly all critics scorned it. Black-and-white photography was glorified as more interpretive and tasteful. Color could not mingle with the highbrow black-and-whites of the '50s.

But of course there were rebels: artists from across the nation who picked up a Polaroid and snapped away at the changing American landscape. They brought color into the picture and gave it artistic value throughout the '70s. Now, four decades later, color photography is the language of all — and galleries are not afraid to show it.

One such gallery is the Princeton University Art Museum. Its exhibition, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980, is the first museum survey of the "new color photography." It highlights 18 artists, each with a different bend on the new technology of the era.

Granted, there are a lot of pictures of houses and cars — safe subjects for the less risky. Then come the experimenters, the ones who dared to photograph people! One such artist is Neal Slavin. Known for his group portraits, Slavin sought out the strangest organizations of American citizens and had them position themselves. What resulted were eerie photos of somber souls from the International Twins Association, the Star Trek Convention and the Lloyd Rod and Gun Club.

Another photographer not afraid of people is Les Krims. In a jaw-dropping and amusing series called Fictcryptokrimsographs, Krims staged half-naked women in ridiculous science-mocking tests. All the scenarios stem from his own imagination, which causes viewers to question his mental stability.

Some artists don't bother with people, houses or cars. Some choose inanimate household objects as their subjects. Harold Edgerton, an MIT electrical engineering professor, began experimenting with stroboscopic photography in the '40s. He used a strobe light to capture momentous images of balloons bursting and bullets cutting through apples. It was pretty fancy technology for the time. His 1964 piece "Cutting the Card Quickly" stands out in the gallery like an image from the future.

Taking up two walls in the gallery is the work of Robert Heinecken. An artist of reappropriation, Heinecken superimposed a grayscale photo of a smiling South Vietnam soldier proudly grasping the decapitated heads of two Vietcong soldiers onto fashion magazine clippings. It's disturbing but amusing, especially when the soldier smirks over a Ray-Ban advertisement reading "the glare killers are man killers now."

Heinecken did not stop his radical streak there. In a series called Reconfigured Magazines made from 1969-1971, Heinecken bought newsstand magazines, took them apart, and overlaid photos of pornography or war using an offset lithograph process. He was an agitator, to say the least.

Almost all of Starburst's artists garnered mixed reactions during their time. They were hippies, runaways and activists. One artist stalked Andy Warhol's Factory. One took pictures of kitchen utensils in elaborate arrangements. One hung out a car window to snap shots of passersby. They may have been lunatics, but without them we would still be in black-and-white today.