Szarkowski

"It is hard to remember how uniquely powerful and respected Szarkowski was back then. If Szarkowski hadn't done that show, it's hard to imagine color gaining the traction to become what it is today. I had done some color self-portraits and landscapes as early as 1969, but my first serious pictures in color were of the jungles in Hawaii in 1978, and were a fairly direct transition of my night desert work. I was still working with a Hasselblad, at night, with a strobe, but I shifted my subject from the sparse desert vegetation to the lush tropical landscape, and shot it in color instead of black and white. It was a pretty straight forward move, really. But I was hooked. I have never taken a black and white picture since.

And one more point regarding the color revolution that Szarkowski engendered. The explosion of color activity from then on has had a huge impact on the whole field of art, not just photography. I think that, in the future, some serious art historical criticism will be focused on the 1970s color photo movement as a powerful and pivotal period of practice, with the same importance of other historical art-world movements like minimalism, conceptual art, performance art, and so on. I think that the early color period paved the way for another rich level of practice, including digital color photography. Both the early period of color, and the seconf phase of digital color photography are at the heart of art world practice today. This was not imaginable back in the 1970s."

Richard Misrach

(a entrevista toda aqui.)

várias imagens de Richard Misrach. mais aqui. e aqui.