Colour as Form

Guy Tal

Professional photographic artist, author and speaker working primarily in the Western US.

guytal.com

Color is all. When color is right, form is right.~ Marc Chagall

Kodachrome, introduced in 1935, was the first colour film to be mass-marketed successfully. Although Kodachrome quickly became popular with hobbyists and commercial photographers, so-called “fine-art photographers” have initially shunned the use of colour, and many have expressed derisive views of colour photography. It is both common and ironic that any time a new technology or aesthetic is introduced into the photographic milieu, it is greeted with dogmatic ire. This was the case when flexible film made glass plates obsolete, when simple hand-held cameras became affordable and widely available, when colour photography was invented, when computerised processing tools expanded photographers’ creative options beyond what was possible using chemistry, and when digital capture technology began to rival the capabilities of film.