14 Wonderful Color Photographs of the United States From the 1950s and 1960s ~ Vintage Everyday

February 22, 2015

14 Wonderful Color Photographs of the United States From the 1950s and 1960s

February 22, 2015 1950s, 1960s, life & culture, people, street

Like many of her colleagues, Inge Morath carried one camera loaded with black-and-white film and another loaded with color. Possibly influenced by the legendary hostility of Henri Cartier-Bresson (her mentor) to color photography, Morath's own ambivalence is reflected in the contradiction between the sheer volume of color film that she exposed during her lifetime and its complete absence from her exhibited and published works.

Following Morath's death in 2002, more than 10,000 hitherto unknown and uncataloged color originals were recovered from storage in Paris, where Morath had been based from 1954 until 1962.

Morath's color vision matured around 1958, while documenting the Danube River; by the late 1960s and during the 1970s, when she worked extensively in Russia and China, Morath's color production would at times exceed her work in black and white, and several projects done late in her life were made exclusively in color.

"If I had to do color and black and white simultaneously," she recalled, "I'd finish one, then do [the other], trying not to think of both at the same time; the thinking is so different!"