Exhibit of the week: Color! American Photography Transformed

Some 40 years ago, a handful of camera-carrying renegades “practically saved photography as an art form.”

Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth

Through Jan. 5

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This unprecedented show scans the full history, said William Meyers in The Wall Street Journal. As early as 1851, a rural New York photographer named Levi Hill came up with a process that captured a slight hint of color. A “Hillotype” hangs here near a circa-1850 group portrait that was colorized the more popular way: tinting the print by hand. Though “the artifice is apparent” in the figures’ pink cheeks and blue dresses, the image “has considerable charm.” Yet color remained hard to control long after even 1942’s introduction of Kodacolor: A bright-red traffic light, for instance, might steal attention from other details of a complex street scene. Even so, prevailing habits were overdue for a change by 1976, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art mounted an Eggleston solo show. He’s represented here by Memphis, a 1970 image of a green-tiled shower that proved that color could provide an emotional cue without becoming every image’s subject.

If only this show were twice as large, said Rick Brettell in The Dallas Morning News. It covers 160-plus years of history in just 75 photographs, representing nearly the same number of photographers with just one image each. We’re living in what’s surely “the great age of American color photography,” yet we get no chance for in-depth study of such contemporary greats as Cindy Sherman or Gregory Crewdson. “Quibbles aside,” though, “no one seriously interested in modern art” can afford to miss this show here or at its coming stop in Memphis. “Its regional reach is unfortunate when it is of national, indeed, international importance.”