© Anne Turyn, 12-17-1960, from ‘Flashbulb Memories’ (1986)
“Colour expands a photograph’s palette and adds a new level of descriptive information and transparency to the image. It is more transparent because one is stopped less by the surface – colour is more like how we see. It has added description because it shows the colour of light and the colours of a culture or an age. While made in the 1980s, the palette of this image by Anne Turyn seems to date the picture a generation earlier.”
From ‘The Nature of Photographs‘ by Stephen Shore (Phaidon 2007) p.18.
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Yet, while I was recently watching The Genius of Photography (Episode 4) it came as a pleasant surprise to hear how William Eggleston was described as unreadable. This is the photographer of course, who brought serious colour photography into the mainstream art world (see for example a review by Photo Book Guide).