Styles / Documentary & reportage

New Color photography

1970–1987. United States. Also called New Color or New Colour photography.

Where the lights stand

Key: the sun, about 45° to the camera’s left, high, hard.
Ambient light: the open sky, from behind, to the camera’s right, soft.

Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down. Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.

Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.

Where you have seen it

The photographs that define it are still in copyright, so they are linked below rather than shown.

Colour photographs of ordinary American things: a parked truck, an oven, a street corner, a motel room, a roadside after a flood, made when colour still meant advertising and snapshots. The colour of paint, signs, skies and plastic is the subject, caught in late or high sun or with a flash at dusk and printed straight, as dye transfers or chromogenic prints. The pictures were gathered in books.

Shoot sheet for your kit The photographs

How the look is made

Photograph ordinary, unstyled things and places, and let their colour be what the picture is about.
Work in colour from the start; see the scene as colour, not as tones.
Choose light that makes colour sing: late sun, high sun on paint and signs, or a flash at dusk.
Frame plainly, level and often centred, and keep the whole scene sharp.
Print straight, with nothing added or removed, and sequence the pictures into a book.

Shoot sheet for your kit

Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.

Step 1

Light

Key: the sun, about 45° to the camera’s left, high, hard.
Ambient light: the open sky, from behind, to the camera’s right, soft.

Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down.
Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.

Shadow edges: Shadows with crisp outlines, cast by a small or distant light: direct sun, a bare flash, a spotlight.
Shadow depth: Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).

How the style is lit

Late-afternoon sun low across streets, car bodies and walls, with long shadows.
High, clear midday sun on painted signs and facades.
An on-camera flash at dusk or indoors, mixed with the last daylight or room light.

This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.

Step 2

Lens and settings

Start at

40 mmf/41/2000 sISO 100

On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.

The style’s f/27 on 8 × 10 in gives about the depth of field of f/3.6 on full frame.

Then: 35–50 mm · f/8–f/90 · 1/500–1 s · ISO 25–125 on 8 × 10 in, documented. Shore and Sternfeld on 8×10 too (Ektacolor, then Vericolor). Eggleston's handheld Leica on slide film, near f/8 and 1/125–1/500 s, is inferred.
White balance: Daylight slide and negative film; a tungsten-balanced negative used by day without its filter, corrected in the print; lamps at dusk glow warm against the blue (partly inferred).

Focal length: Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.
Focus: Everything sharp from the nearest stone to the horizon.
Angle: The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
Distance: Whole figures and their immediate surroundings.
Balance: The subject in the middle, the frame balanced around it. The subject faces the lens; planes run parallel to the picture.
Duration: An unmoving scene, exposed slowly and carefully.

Step 3

Direct

Most pictures have nobody in them. When people appear they are found or barely asked: standing in a yard, sitting on a bed or lying on the grass, arms loose, looking at the camera or past it with a calm, unsmiling face, never performing, often small enough for their clothes and surroundings to carry the colour.

Line & energy: Loose and unforced, as people stand and sit when they forget the camera, whether caught or coaxed by prompts.
Expression: Unsmiling, composed and blank: the face gives nothing away.
Without a pose: No people at all, or people so small or far off that their pose does not read (hands alone are Hands alone).
With the sitter: Neutral, unemotional and distant.

Step 4

Style the set

Nothing is styled or moved: trucks, signs, ovens, motel rooms and yards appear as found, with worn paint, clutter and signs of use; people wear the everyday clothes they happened to have on, and the colour comes from what was already there.

Clothes: What people happened to be wearing; nothing chosen for the picture.
Set & props: A real home, workplace or street that belongs to the people in it, not a set, with their own things and traces of use.
How much is styled: Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.

Step 5

Finish

Colour: The colour of ordinary things treated as the point of the picture. Strong, dense colours. An overall yellow, orange or red cast.
Film: A view camera on a tripod: great detail, slow and deliberate. Transparencies: dense, saturated colour. Printed colour negatives: soft, forgiving colour.
Post-production: Nothing changed beyond exposure and development.
Shown as: Pictures made and shown as a set.
Shown in: The book as the main form of the work.

Stay away from black & white, full range, high-contrast black & white, heavy retouching, composite & montage, directed scene & tableau, glamour & aspiration, sell & persuade, fully art-directed and theatrical & acted.

Before you shoot it

The leading photographers of this style are living artists: never prompt by their names and never recreate their specific pictures; make the subjects and places your own.

Where to see it

From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.

In copyright, so linked

Untitled (plate 12 from a portfolio of fourteen images) , William Eggleston, 1974, printed 1974. Art Institute of Chicago.
Second Street East & South Main Street, Kalispell, Montana , Stephen Shore, August 22, 1974. Art Institute of Chicago.
Hartwig House, Truro, Cape Cod, from the series "The Cape" , Joel Meyerowitz, 1976, printed 1979. Art Institute of Chicago.
After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California, July 1979, from the series "American Prospects" , Joel Sternfeld, July 1979, printed September 1987. Art Institute of Chicago.

With other styles

Pairs with New Topographics.

The opposite: E-commerce packshot on white. Both make colour the point, but the packshot's colour is styled to sell; New Color finds it in things nobody styled, so leave the scene as you find it.

The opposite: VSCO film-preset look. A film preset lays a nostalgic grade over any scene; New Color gets its colour from the scene and the film and prints it straight.

Sources

William Eggleston, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Eggleston (Leica; colour transparency film dominant by the late 1960s; dye transfer discovered at Harvard 1973–74, The Red Ceiling 1973; the 1976 MoMA show and the Guide; Memphis and Mississippi subjects)
Photographs by William Eggleston, installation views, Museum of Modern Art: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2079 (exhibition dates 24 May – 1 August 1976, via the MoMA installation-image pages)
Stephen Shore, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Shore (American Surfaces 1972–73, Light Gallery 1972; move to 8×10; Uncommon Places, Aperture 1982; 1976 MoMA solo show; New Topographics 1975)
Joel Sternfeld, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Sternfeld (American Prospects begun 1978, published 1987; large-format camera; pastel hues after Albers)
Joel Meyerowitz, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Meyerowitz (permanently adopted colour in 1972; 8×10 camera; Cape Light)
Dye-transfer process, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye-transfer_process (gamut, control and permanence; used by Eggleston)
Sally Eauclaire, The New Color Photography (Abbeville, 1981), Canadian Centre for Architecture library record: https://cca.qc.ca/en/search/details/library/publication/07903856 (publication details)
The New Color, Artforum: https://www.artforum.com/events/the-new-color-227591/ (1981 review of Eauclaire's book, which puts Eggleston first and gives Meyerowitz equal space)
William Eggleston, Memphis, Art Institute of Chicago: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/188843 (in the Guide; colour once thought commercial; mundane subjects)
Stephen Shore, Second Street East & South Main Street, Kalispell, Montana, Art Institute of Chicago: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/104203 (anticommercial colour, deadpan appraisal, muted palette)
Joel Sternfeld, After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California, July 1979, Art Institute of Chicago: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/127872 (large-format view camera; American Prospects; colour for emotional complexity)
Guénola Pellen, Fifty Years Ago, Joel Meyerowitz Tipped Into the Light, Blind Magazine, 5 August 2026: https://www.blind-magazine.com/en/news/fifty-years-ago-joel-meyerowitz-tipped-into-the-light/ (Cape Light made with 'a Deardorff that left the workshop in 1938'; 'A wide-field Ektar lens of 250 millimeters'; 'a Vericolor II Type L rated at 80 ASA', used without the daylight filter; 'By day the exposure ran half a second at f/90', at the end of the day four to ten minutes; from the technical note that closes the book)
The camera that captured Cape Cod light, Phaidon: https://www.phaidon.com/en-us/blogs/phaidon-archive/the-camera-that-captured-cape-cod-light ('In 1976 Meyerowitz acquired an 8x10 inch Deardorff view camera', used for the series published in 1978 as Cape Light)
Stephen Shore, Lapis Press release for New York, 1974 (2023): https://lapispress.com/usr/library/documents/main/artists/59/shorepressrelease.pdf ('I spent the summer of 1974 traveling across America, photographing with an 8 x 10 view camera')
Aaron Schuman, Uncommon Places: An Interview with Stephen Shore, SeeSaw Magazine, reprinted at aaronschuman.com: https://www.aaronschuman.com/shoreinterview.html ('All of '73 is 4x5', then the 8×10 on a tripod; 'when Kodak switched its film in '76 from Ektacolor to Vericolor, I had to learn a different palette')
The American Prospects of 1965's Joel Sternfeld, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, November 1987: https://archive.dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/article/1987/11/1/the-american-prospects-of-1965s-joel-sternfeld (American Prospects made with 'a tripodmounted eight-by-ten-inch camera')
Joel Sternfeld with Geoffrey Batchen, The Brooklyn Rail, December 2024: https://brooklynrail.org/2024/12/art/joel-sternfeld-with-geoffrey-batchen/ (the 8×10 as the 'best possible means available' for American Prospects, 'two negatives a day that entire first year'; on After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage: heat-sensitive film kept in the local firehouse, up 'at about 5 o'clock in the morning')
Britt Salvesen, Transparencies, MACK, 2020: https://mackbooks.co.uk/blogs/news/tuesday-31-march-salvesen (Shore's 4×5 from 1973, a Graflex Crown Graphic and then a Cambo; 'Before long Shore was using an 8x10 camera (a Calumet, then Arca Swiss, then Deardorff)')
Anna Kerrer Kivlan, William Eggleston: Who's Afraid of Magenta, Yellow and Cyan?, reposted by American Suburb X, July 2015: https://americansuburbx.com/2015/07/william-eggleston-whos-afraid-of-magenta-yellow-and-cyan.html (the Guide pictures made 'with a Leica', edited from carousels of slides)
Kodak Color Dataguide, Eastman Kodak, 1980, via photomemorabilia.co.uk: https://www.photomemorabilia.co.uk/Colour_Darkroom/MFisher/Kodak_Color_DataGuide_1980.pdf (Kodacolor II ASA 100; Vericolor II Professional Type S ASA 125; Vericolor II Type L 100 at 1/50–1/5 s, 80 at 1 s, falling to 32 at 60 s; Kodachrome 25 and 64; Ektachrome 64, 200 and 400)
Guénola Pellen, Fifty Years Ago, Joel Meyerowitz Tipped Into the Light, Blind Magazine, 5 August 2026: https://www.blind-magazine.com/en/news/fifty-years-ago-joel-meyerowitz-tipped-into-the-light/ (the Vericolor II Type L 'was balanced for tungsten and called for a filter in daylight'; 'Meyerowitz went without, correcting the color at the printing stage instead'; 'A telephone booth lit against the dusk')