The Technology Excuse
Photography Told Itself

The Process Was Already Perfected

Start with the dye-transfer process itself, since it is doing more work in this story than most retellings give it credit for. Dye transfer is a printing method that builds a color photograph from three separate color separation matrices, each dyed and layered onto the final print in succession. It produces extraordinarily saturated, stable color, richer and more durable than the chromogenic prints that would later dominate consumer photography, and it is technically demanding, slow, and expensive. None of that describes an immature or unreliable process. It describes a process good enough that advertising agencies had relied on it for decades to sell cigarettes, cars, and refrigerators in exactly the kind of vivid, dependable color a magazine spread required. By the time William Eggleston walked into a dye-transfer lab to print his own work, the technology had nothing left to prove. It had been proving itself in every glossy advertisement in every magazine on every newsstand for a generation.

If the art establishment's resistance to color had genuinely been a matter of waiting for the medium to mature, dye transfer should have ended the argument decades before it actually did. It did not, because the argument was never really about the medium.

MoMA Had Already Shown This Exact Process

Here is the detail that collapses the technology excuse entirely. In March of 1943, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited "Birds in Color: Flashlight Photographs by Eliot Porter," a solo show of Porter's dye-transfer color prints. The same museum that would later treat Eggleston's dye-transfer prints as a provocation had already hung dye-transfer color prints on its walls thirty-three years earlier, without the surrounding firestorm that met Eggleston in 1976. Porter's process was Eggleston's process. The saturation, the stability, the technical sophistication, all of it identical. What separated the two shows was not the film in the camera or the chemistry in the print. It was the subject matter and the kind of attention each body of work asked the viewer to bring to it.

Porter photographed birds and landscapes, subjects that fit comfortably inside an existing tradition of nature photography as a serious, almost scientific pursuit, one that could be filed alongside Ansel Adams without much friction. Eggleston photographed a tricycle in a driveway, a shower curtain, a dinner table, a coal-fired backyard barbecue, ordinary domestic and vernacular subjects that had never been asked to carry the weight of fine art composition before. The technology that supposedly needed thirty more years to mature had, in fact, already been declared museum-worthy in 1943. What Eggleston's 1976 show actually tested was whether an ordinary American backyard, photographed with the same rigor a painter might bring to a still life, deserved the same seriousness as a bird in flight. That is not a technical question. It never was.

What "Vulgar" Was Actually Judging

Read Walker Evans's 1969 line again with that distinction in mind: "There are four simple words for the matter, which must be whispered: Color photography is vulgar." Evans was not a photographer indifferent to formal rigor. He built a career on the opposite, a spare, deliberate visual style he compared to Hemingway's prose, and he drew a hard professional line between photography as truth-telling and photography as persuasion, a line sharp enough that he openly disdained commercial and fashion photographers like Edward Steichen for what he saw as manufactured elegance in service of selling something. Color, in Evans's working world, lived almost entirely on the persuasion side of that line. It was the language of advertising, of the very magazine culture he held at arm's length even while writing for one of its flagship publications. "Vulgar" was doing class work as much as aesthetic work. It was not describing unstable dyes. It was describing where color photography had been allowed to live, and what kind of subject and intention it was assumed to carry with it.

That is a harder thing to say plainly than "the technology wasn't ready yet," which is probably why the technology excuse survives in so many casual retellings of this history. It is more comfortable to believe an entire generation of serious photographers was exercising patience than to admit they were drawing a boundary around what counted as serious subject matter, and who got to decide.

The Man Who Said Vulgar, Shooting Color Anyway

The most useful complication in this story is Evans himself. He did not stay locked into his 1969 position. In 1974, Evans acquired a Polaroid SX-70 and began shooting color images that pulled words and letters out of their original signage and packaging into abstracted, jarring compositions, work now held in museum collections and discussed with the same seriousness as his black-and-white photography. This was not a minor footnote or a photographer quietly experimenting in private with no stakes. It was the author of "color photography is vulgar" actively making color photographs he considered worth showing, five years after having declared the entire medium beneath consideration.

That reversal matters more than a simple embarrassing contradiction. If Evans's original objection had genuinely been about the state of color technology, nothing meaningful changed about that technology between 1969 and his death in 1975 that would explain why he picked up a Polaroid. What changed was his own willingness to let color carry serious intention rather than assuming it was inherently tied to commercial persuasion. He did not need better film. He needed to stop assuming the medium itself dictated the seriousness of the work made with it.

Worth being precise about the sequence here, since it would be easy to read these two developments as connected and they were not. Evans died in April 1975, more than a year before Eggleston's MoMA show opened in May 1976. He never saw those photographs and had no part in the exhibition that would go on to force the same recognition he had already arrived at privately, on his own, with a Polaroid camera. The two men reached the same conclusion independently, which is a stronger point than if one had simply followed the other's lead. It means the recognition that color could carry serious intention was not one artist's idiosyncratic change of heart happening in isolation. It was becoming true in more than one place at once, for more than one reason, right as the institutional argument against it was about to collapse in public.

Eggleston Forces The Question, Again

In May of 1976, the Museum of Modern Art opened "Photographs by William Eggleston," seventy-five dye-transfer prints curated by John Szarkowski, who had run the museum's photography department since 1962 with enough institutional authority to make the show impossible to dismiss as a fringe experiment. The reception was immediate and hostile. Critics, most notably Hilton Kramer in a widely quoted New York Times review, dismissed the images as banal and boring, objecting less to the color itself than to Eggleston's refusal to discriminate between subjects, his insistence that a shower curtain or a supermarket parking lot deserved the same formal attention as a more conventionally significant scene. That reaction is telling. Nobody was arguing the prints looked chemically unstable or technically deficient. The dye-transfer process had already proven itself decades earlier, in Porter's show and in a thousand advertisements. The objection was that Eggleston had pointed a serious, formally rigorous eye at subjects the art world had decided were beneath that kind of attention, and used the "vulgar" medium to do it.

Szarkowski's own framing of the show, later described as heralding "the discovery of color photography," was itself an overstatement, and a revealing one. Color photography did not need to be discovered in 1976. It had been sitting in MoMA's own exhibition history since 1943. What Szarkowski was actually gambling the museum's authority on was the claim that color, applied to ordinary vernacular subject matter with total formal seriousness, could not be waved away as commercial or amateur. That was never a technology bet. It was a bet on what kind of photograph, and what kind of subject, deserved to be called art.

The Argument Was Never About the Film

Line up the pieces: a printing process mature and proven since the 1940s. A museum that had already exhibited that exact process, without incident, three decades before the controversy the same process would later cause. A photographer whose objection to color evaporated when he picked up a camera capable of it himself. None of these facts fit a story about waiting for better film. They fit a story about which subjects, and whose eye, got to claim the word "serious." Eggleston did not solve a technical problem in 1976. He forced a room full of people who had already seen dye-transfer color photography treated as fine art to admit that their real objection had never been about the dye at all.

Where This Comes From

• Photographs by William Eggleston, The Museum of Modern Art, exhibition record, May 24 to August 1, 1976

• Birds in Color: Flashlight Photographs by Eliot Porter, The Museum of Modern Art, exhibition record, March 10 to April 18, 1943

• Walker Evans: Depth of Field, High Museum of Art

• Eliot Porter, International Center of Photography

• Understanding Modern Art, Module 03, Scott Parker Photo, 6-part course

Further Reading

• The Museum of Modern Art, exhibition record for "Photographs by William Eggleston." Primary institutional confirmation of the exhibition dates and existence of the 1976 show. MoMA's own record, the strongest available source for this fact.

• The Museum of Modern Art, exhibition record for "Birds in Color: Flashlight Photographs by Eliot Porter." Primary institutional confirmation that MoMA exhibited dye-transfer color photography in 1943, the fact this article's central argument depends on. Also MoMA's own record.

• High Museum of Art, "Walker Evans: Depth of Field." Museum-published confirmation that Evans, after declaring color photography vulgar in 1969, produced color Polaroid work in the mid-1970s, now held and exhibited as serious work in its own right.

• International Center of Photography, Eliot Porter biography. Confirms Porter's specialization in dye-transfer printing beginning in 1940 and the 1943 MoMA exhibition, corroborating the MoMA exhibition record from an independent institutional source.

• A sourcing note on quotations: Walker Evans's 1969 "vulgar" statement and Hilton Kramer's 1976 New York Times review of the Eggleston show are both quoted consistently across numerous independent art-press and museum-adjacent sources. This article relies on that consistent secondary attribution rather than direct access to the original 1969 interview or the original 1976 Times review, and states that plainly here rather than presenting the quotations as independently verified against primary text.

Chronology

Date Event Dec 6, 1901 Eliot Porter born Nov 3, 1903 Walker Evans born Dec 18, 1925 John Szarkowski born March 25, 1928 Hilton Kramer born July 27, 1939 William Eggleston born March 10 to April 18, 1943 MoMA exhibits Porter's "Birds in Color," dye-transfer prints 1962 Szarkowski becomes director of MoMA's photography department 1969 Evans states "color photography is vulgar" 1974 Evans acquires a color Polaroid SX-70 April 10, 1975 Walker Evans dies, age 71, more than a year before the Eggleston show opens May 24 to August 1, 1976 MoMA exhibits "Photographs by William Eggleston," curated by Szarkowski; Kramer pans it in the New York Times November 2, 1990 Eliot Porter dies, age 88 July 7, 2007 John Szarkowski dies, age 81 March 27, 2012 Hilton Kramer dies, age 84 living William Eggleston