Preview our Spring 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
APERTURE
Color Rush
American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman
Text by Lisa Hostetler, Katherine Bussard.
Today color photography is so ubiquitous that it’s hard to believe there was a time when this was not the case. Color Rush explores the developments that led us to this point, looking at the way color photographs circulated and appeared at the time of their making. From magazine pages to gallery walls, from advertisements to photojournalism, Color Rush charts the history of color photography in the United States from the moment it became available as a mass medium to the moment when it no longer seemed an unusual choice for artists. The book begins with the 1907 unveiling of autochrome, the first commercially available color process, and continues up through the 1981 landmark survey show and book, The New Color Photography, which hailed the widespread acceptance of color photography in contemporary art. In the intervening years, color photography captured the popular imagination through its visibility in magazines like Life and Vogue, as well as through its accessibility in the marketplace thanks to companies like Kodak. Often in photo histories, color is presented as having arrived fully formed in the 1970s; this book reveals a deeper story and uncovers connections in both artistic and commercial practices. A comprehensive chronology and examples of significant moments and movements mark the increasing visibility of color photography. Color Rush brings together photographers and artists such as Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, László Moholy-Nagy, Irving Penn, Eliot Porter, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, Laurie Simmons, Edward Steichen, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston and many others, and examines them in a fresh context paying particular attention to color photography’s translation onto the printed page. In doing so, it traces a new history that more fully accounts for color’s pervasive presence today.
Featured photograph, "Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975," by Stephen Shore, is reproduced from Color Rush.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
New York Magazine
Even as late as the seventies, a lot of serious photographers looked askance at color pictures. Black-and-white was pure, documentary, the medium of Arbus and Adams and Avedon. Color was for ads and blockbusters. That attitude is mostly gone now—William Eggleston, Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, and many others helped bury it for good—but spend some time with Katherine A. Bussard and Lisa Hostetler’s Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman (Aperture, $60), and you’ll begin to realize that it was bunk all along. For one thing, the marriage of art and technology that these images required is, itself, compelling: You cannot help staring at, say, a color photo of Parisian life in 1907, as much for its achievement as for its content. Even more eye-opening are those very approaches that highfalutin artists eschewed: the oversaturated Kodachrome jewel tones that make a Hollywood tableau simultaneously over-the-top and exactly right, or the crisp, sad Americana of Stephen Shore, or the ultrabrowsable American memory bank that is Life magazine. Makes you realize: There’s a reason its logo was bright red.
American Photo
Jack Crager
This is an overview of pioneers in color photography, from Stieglitz to Sherman, with salient images such as Nickolas Muray's "Bathing Pool Scene", above.
"Christmas Cakes and Cookies" (circa 1935), by pioneering commercial photographer Nickolas Muray, is reproduced from Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman—one of our favorite photography books of 2013. Muray's work with carbro color printing revolutionized American lifestyle and fashion magazines. "Though carbro printing was complicated and expensive, requiring the combination of three separate negatives to create the color tonality of the final print, Muray regularly employed the process due to its ability to reproduce vibrant, eye-catching hues that captured the attention of readers… Muray's advertising photography made its debut at a fine-art institution when Beaumont Newhall included two of his carbro prints in the color section of the 1937 exhibition Photography 1839–1937 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Though displayed alongside carbro prints by photographers such as Edward Steichen and Paul Outerbridge, Muray's prints were the only advertising photographs in the exhibition that were commissioned by commercial brands. Muray was such an accomplished practitioner that it was no surprise his work was chosen by Newhall as the quintessential model of carbro color photography in advertising." continue to blog
"Mario" (1978), by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, is reproduced from Color Rush, one of our top Holiday Gift Books of 2013. Brimming with outstanding examples of color photography both vintage and contemporary, from magazine pages to gallery walls, and from advertisements to photojournalism, Color Rush charts the history of the medium in the United States from the 1907 unveiling of the autochrome (the first commercially available color process), through the landmark 1981 survey and exhibition catalog, The New Color Photography, which hailed the widespread acceptance of color photography in contemporary art. Essayist Katherine A. Bussard writes, "Although the photograph plays off the long history of color snapshots (and, in fact, the man is diCorcia's brother), diCorcia purposefully amplified the fluorescent light from the refrigerator to achieve an uneasy green cast, full of drama that would be unusual in an everyday snapshot. Because of this connection, meaning shifts and morphs in diCorcia's work in relation to each viewer's own personal photographs. The carefully constructed narrative is continually altered." continue to blog
Featured image, Joel Meyerowitz's "Red Interior, Provincetown" (1977), is reproduced from Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman, published by Aperture. Spanning from "magazine pages to gallery walls, advertisements to photojournalism," Color Rush connects the history of color photography from 1907—when the Lumière brothers unveiled the autochrome process in Paris—to 1981—when curator Sally Eauclaire mounted the landmark ICP exhibition, The New Color Photography. Meyerowitz is quoted, "When I committed myself to color exclusively, it was a response to a greater need for description… When I say description, I don’t only mean mere fact and the cold accounting of things in the frame. I really mean the sensation I get from things—their surface and color—my memory of them in other conditions as well as their connotative qualities. Color plays itself out along a richer band of feelings—more wavelengths, more radiance, more sensation." continue to blog
Featured image, Bauhaus luminary László Moholy-Nagy's "Study with Pins and Ribbons" (1937-38), is reproduced from Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman, published by Aperture to accompany the Milwaukee Art Museum's remarkable spring exhibition. Spanning from "magazine pages to gallery walls, advertisements to photojournalism," Color Rush connects the history of color photography from 1907—when the Lumière brothers unveiled the autochrome process in Paris—to 1981—when curator Sally Eauclaire mounted the landmark ICP exhibition, The New Color Photography. For Moholy-Nagy, essayist Lisa Hostetler writes, the camera was "a thoroughly modern tool that allowed for refreshed ways of seeing because it transcribed light—the most fundamental component of vision—directly, without the intervention of human subjectivity." continue to blog
This week Aperture released Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman, the catalog for the Milwaukee Art Museum's stellar exhibition of color photography from its inception in the early 1900s through 1981, when the International Center of Photography opened the landmark exhibition, The New Color, featuring work by William Eggleston, Jan Groover, Joel Meyerowitz, Lucas Samaras, Stephen Shore and Eve Sonneman, among others. Nickolas Muray's "Bathing Pool Scene," shot for the June, 1931, issue of Ladies Home Journal, "marked the first color reproduction made from a color carbro photograph, a revolutionary step in color printing that would soon be copied by nearly every popular American lifestyle and fashion magazine," according to essayist Alissa Schapiro, who quotes Muray, "Color calls for a new way of looking at people, at things, and a new way of looking at color." To see a slideshow of images from the book, see the April 14 review in New York Magazine. continue to blog
Featured image, Edward Steichen's cover for the July 20, 1932, issue of Vogue, is reproduced from Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman, published by Aperture to accompany the Milwaukee Art Museum's remarkable spring exhibition. Spanning from "magazine pages to gallery walls, advertisements to photojournalism," Color Rush connects the history of color photography from 1907, when the Lumière brothers unveiled the autochrome process to a Parisian audience (which included Steichen), to 1981, when curator Sally Eauclaire mounted the landmark ICP exhibition, The New Color.
continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 288 pgs / 260 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $60.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $70 ISBN: 9781597112260 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 4/30/2013 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
Color Rush American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman
Published by Aperture. Text by Lisa Hostetler, Katherine Bussard.
Today color photography is so ubiquitous that it’s hard to believe there was a time when this was not the case. Color Rush explores the developments that led us to this point, looking at the way color photographs circulated and appeared at the time of their making. From magazine pages to gallery walls, from advertisements to photojournalism, Color Rush charts the history of color photography in the United States from the moment it became available as a mass medium to the moment when it no longer seemed an unusual choice for artists. The book begins with the 1907 unveiling of autochrome, the first commercially available color process, and continues up through the 1981 landmark survey show and book, The New Color Photography, which hailed the widespread acceptance of color photography in contemporary art. In the intervening years, color photography captured the popular imagination through its visibility in magazines like Life and Vogue, as well as through its accessibility in the marketplace thanks to companies like Kodak. Often in photo histories, color is presented as having arrived fully formed in the 1970s; this book reveals a deeper story and uncovers connections in both artistic and commercial practices. A comprehensive chronology and examples of significant moments and movements mark the increasing visibility of color photography. Color Rush brings together photographers and artists such as Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, László Moholy-Nagy, Irving Penn, Eliot Porter, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, Laurie Simmons, Edward Steichen, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston and many others, and examines them in a fresh context paying particular attention to color photography’s translation onto the printed page. In doing so, it traces a new history that more fully accounts for color’s pervasive presence today.
