New Color refers to photographic practices since the 1970s that treat color not as decoration but as central to the production of meaning.
In 1970s America, color was raised from the gloss of advertising and tourism into a serious art-photography language for reading suburbs, roadsides, household goods, and asphalt. Around Eggleston and Shore, color carried the temperature and vulgarity of everyday life.
New Color's claim was that the color and vulgarity of everyday American life — the suburb, the roadside, the supermarket — were not beneath art photography but its proper subject, and that color was the right tool for that reading.
New Color refers to photographic practices since the 1970s that treat color not as decoration but as central to the production of meaning.*1
On this site, photographers connected to New Color appear mainly in 1980–1990s, often overlapping with Documentary.*2
New Color often overlaps with Documentary. Reading those pages together makes it easier to see where method, institution, or critical language begins to diverge.*4