New American Color Photography

“Perfectly boring,” wrote the _New York Times_’ Hilton Kramer of William Eggleston’s exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1976—the first major museum exhibition of color photography. What he (and the many other critics who panned the show) did not anticipate was that Eggleston's exhibition would be the watershed moment for color photography. Alongside Eggleston in the late 1960s and ’70s, Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore, Richard Misrach, and a host of American photographers exploded the boundaries of photography through the use of color. After the fact, these artists were grouped by the term New American Color Photography; in concert with their use of color, these artists focused on contemporary life, presenting raw portraits of suburbia and critiques of “The American dream.”