From the first color photograph produced by a glass plate lined with dyed potato starch in 1851 to the rise of digital photography in the 21st century, color has had an intrinsic yet fraught relationship to photography, which John Rohrbach, the senior curator of photographs at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Tex., outlines in Color: American Photography Transformed.
In the beginning, there was some question as to whether color photography was even art; Alfred Stieglitz, for example, considered it a pale imitation of reality. It was not until the mid-1970s and William Eggleston's pictures of everyday Southern life--combining a painterly knowledge of color with the spontaneous quality of a snapshot--that color photography finally earned respect. With 75 iconic works, lively, engaging text, and an appendix essay on the early challenges of developing color images, this book is a must for anyone with a deep interest in the evolution of both American and western photography. --Thuy Dinh, editor, Da Mau magazine