Over the past three decades, color photography has become such a familiar presence in contemporary art that it is startling to be reminded how low its prospects once looked. In 1970 the American museum canon of art photography was broad enough to encompass an array of approaches, from the nature poetry of Edward Weston to elegant “decisive moments” in the manner of Henri Cartier-Bresson to Diane Arbus’s razor-eyed social portraiture.

Stylistic range notwithstanding, the recognized masters of the moment had in common a deep commitment to the graphic language of black-and-white. Aesthetically, color was regarded as too literal-minded, and too tainted by its commercial history, to hold much promise outside the cheery domains of magazine advertising, calendar art, and the living room slide show. For most artist-photographers, moreover, color printing had long been too costly, and chemically too unstable, to exert much attraction. In those schools and departments where photography was taught, several generations of camera artists had learned to write off color as pretty, trivial, and lowbrow.

Cue the next generation. Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970–1980 is the first historical survey of what critics of the 1970s dubbed “The New Color Photography.” The exhibition focuses on eighteen artists, including William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, who embraced color despite, or precisely for, its seeming artlessness. If the duality inherent in black-and-white made it ideal for diagramming intense feelings (hope vs. gloom, righteous vs. evil, ugly vs. beautiful), color’s equanimity gave artists a way to explore the ambivalent mood of a decade trailing the heels of the Sixties: an era of collapsed ideals, disappointed hopes, upended social values, and unsettled sexual politics.

Among the artists in Starburst who first took up the camera in the late 1960s is Stephen Shore. A precocious New Yorker, by his late teens Shore was photographing (in cool black-and-white) the goings-on at Andy Warhol’s Factory. In his early twenties, Shore climbed in a car and discovered a continent beyond the Hudson; he later recalled, “It was a shock.” Instinctively alert to the visual lessons of Pop, Shore soon saw that through the palette of color film—a modern, industrial material—his pictures would fall into tune with a landscape of tract houses, formica counters, plastic signage, and television.

Another artist, Eve Sonneman, explained: “I photograph in color because the world is in color.” (In the same spirit of candor, she habitually chose two frames of film to print and exhibit side-by-side, handily dismantling the “decisiveness” of the Cartier-Bresson ethic.) Jan Groover, in her close-up still lifes, and Neal Slavin, in his posed studies of social groups, used color not for the sake of naturalism so much as to put their pictures in conversation with other types of imagery: respectively, abstract painting and the lowest of photography’s low genres, the hotel-conference group portrait.

Through color, photographers brought themselves into sync with other media and movements of the period. Such connections came naturally; four photographers in Starburst—Groover, Robert Heinecken, William Christenberry, and Barbara Kasten—had been painters, while three others—Les Krims, John Divola, and John Pfahl—wittily incorporated elements of performance and conceptual art in their camera work. (Photorealist painting, a special crossover case, is the focus of a concurrent installation featuring eight screenprints by Richard Estes from the Museum’s collection.)

Photography’s marriage, via color, to contemporary art, outlasted the 1970s. The turn of the decade was marked by the election of Ronald Reagan, a national political turn toward the right, and, in culture, the rise of self-appointed defenders of tradition. Yet even as artists returned to some of photography’s deepest-rooted themes, such as the social landscape, their return came dressed in color and took an international, indeed global, outlook. The medium as we know it today had been born.

Kevin Moore, curator of the exhibition, completed his dissertation at Princeton University in 2002. He is the author of Jacques-Henri Lartigue: Invention of an Artist (2004) and a contributing author of New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac (2007). Joel Smith Curator of Photography