Color photography became common for everyday consumers in the mid-1960s. While color film had been available since 1935, it wasn’t until 1964 that consumer color photos actually outnumbered black-and-white ones. By the early 1970s, color was the default for family snapshots, and by the 1980s, black-and-white film was largely a niche choice for artists and professionals.
That shift didn’t happen overnight. It took roughly three decades of cheaper film, simpler cameras, and faster processing to move color photography from a luxury to something everyone expected.
Kodachrome Started It in 1935
Kodak introduced Kodachrome film in 1935, making it the first commercially successful color film for amateur photographers. Before Kodachrome, color processes existed but were expensive, unreliable, and mostly limited to professionals or dedicated hobbyists. Kodachrome changed that by producing vivid, stable colors on a film that fit standard 35mm cameras.
Still, Kodachrome wasn’t cheap, and getting it processed required sending it to a Kodak lab. By 1939, Kodak offered a ready-mount service for 35mm Kodachrome slides, so photographers could project their images as soon as the film came back from processing. This made color slides a popular format for travel photography and family gatherings, but the cost and effort kept black-and-white as the standard for most casual shooting through the 1940s and 1950s.
The 1960s Tipping Point
The real turning point came in 1963, when Kodak released the Instamatic camera with its new 126 film cartridge. Before the Instamatic, loading roll film into a camera was fiddly enough to discourage casual users. The 126 cartridge was self-contained: you dropped it into the camera, wound it a few times, and started shooting. Over 50 million Instamatic cameras were produced between 1963 and 1970.
The Instamatic made photography nearly effortless, and most of the film cartridges sold for it were color. By 1964, consumers were shooting more color photos than black-and-white for the first time. The combination of an affordable camera (some Instamatic models cost under $20) and easy-to-use color film meant that families who had never bothered with photography before were now filling shoeboxes with color prints.
Instant Color and the 1970s Boom
Polaroid pushed color photography even further into daily life. The Polaroid SX-70, introduced in 1972, produced color prints that developed right before your eyes. No film to send off, no waiting for prints. The original SX-70 was expensive, but when Polaroid released the $40 OneStep camera in 1977 (using the same SX-70 film), it became the best-selling camera of that Christmas season.
By the late 1970s, the market was saturated with color. Calendars, postcards, advertisements, and magazines were all full color. Amateur photographers could point and shoot with little thought about technical settings. Color was no longer a novelty or a deliberate choice. It was simply what photographs looked like.
Color’s Slow Acceptance as Art
Interestingly, while families had been shooting in color since the mid-1960s, the fine art world resisted it for years. Serious photographers and curators considered color too commercial, too associated with snapshots and advertising to qualify as art. Black-and-white was seen as the medium of real photography.
That began to change in 1976, when photographer William Eggleston had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Critics hated it. The show was called “the most hated show of the year” for its unapologetic use of color to photograph ordinary, mundane subjects. But the exhibition proved to be a turning point. Over the following decade, color photography steadily gained acceptance in galleries and museums, and today it’s the dominant format in fine art photography. The fact that it took the art establishment more than a decade longer than average consumers to embrace color says something about how thoroughly ordinary people had already made the switch.
Newspapers Were Even Later
If the art world was slow, newspapers were slower. Printing color on newsprint at high speed was technically difficult and expensive. Most newspapers ran entirely in black-and-white well into the 1980s. The landmark moment came on September 15, 1982, when USA Today launched as the first major national newspaper built around color from the start. Its full-color weather map and color photos on the front and back pages were a deliberate break from tradition.
The effort behind USA Today’s color pages was enormous. By one editor’s estimate, the staff invested roughly 30 hours of combined work every day on the color weather page alone. Competing newspapers that tried to imitate the look often spent 90 minutes on similar pages, and the difference showed. Still, USA Today’s success pushed the rest of the industry toward color. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, newspapers gradually added color printing capabilities, and by the 2000s, full-color front pages were standard.
A Timeline of “Common”
The answer to “when did color photos become common” depends on what you mean by common:
- 1935: Color film first became available to consumers through Kodachrome.
- 1963-1964: The Kodak Instamatic made color shooting easy and affordable, and consumer color photos outnumbered black-and-white for the first time.
- Mid-1970s: Color was the overwhelming default for family and casual photography.
- 1982: Color arrived in daily newspapers with USA Today’s launch.
- Late 1980s-1990s: Color became universal across print media, and black-and-white became a purely artistic or stylistic choice.
For most people asking this question, the practical answer is the mid-1960s. That’s when color stopped being a special occasion and became what you loaded into your camera without thinking about it.