Photographers absolutely did use color before 1970. Color film had been commercially available since the mid-1930s, and by the 1960s, most amateur snapshots were already being taken in color. What changed around 1970 was that serious, artistic, and documentary photographers finally started embracing color as a legitimate medium. Before that, the photography world treated color as something for amateurs and advertisers, not for art. The reasons were part economic, part technical, and part pure snobbery.
Color Film Existed for Decades
Kodak introduced Kodachrome color slide film in 1935, and color negative film for prints followed in the 1940s. By 1963, Kodak’s Instamatic camera made color photography so simple and affordable that it triggered a boom in consumer photo labs churning out color prints for everyday users. Families were shooting vacations, birthdays, and holidays in color throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The idea that color photography didn’t exist before 1970 is a misunderstanding rooted in what we see preserved in museums, newspapers, and photo books from that era, which was overwhelmingly black and white.
Cost Kept Professionals in Black and White
Color was significantly more expensive at every step. In the 1960s United States, developing a roll of black and white film cost about 25 cents, with each print running around 10 cents. A roll of color film cost $1.00 to develop, and prints were 29 cents each. That’s roughly four times the price for developing and three times the price per print. For a working photographer shooting dozens of rolls a week, that difference added up fast.
The cost gap mattered even more in the darkroom. Black and white processing is relatively forgiving. A photographer could develop film and make prints with simple chemicals, a few trays, and a basic enlarger in a home bathroom. Color processing required precise temperature control, more expensive chemistry, and more sophisticated equipment. Most serious photographers handled their own printing, and black and white gave them complete control over the final image without a major investment.
Early Color Prints Faded Badly
Professional photographers also had a practical concern: color prints didn’t last. The dyes used in color photographs made before the 1960s were chemically unstable. Yellow borders, color shifting, and noticeable fading were common problems in both fiber-based prints from that era and the resin-coated prints that followed in the 1960s and 1970s. The National Archives stores its color print holdings in cold storage, kept about 20 degrees cooler than the facilities used for black and white work, specifically to slow the chemical decay of color dyes.
Black and white prints, by contrast, use metallic silver suspended in gelatin. While they can develop silver mirroring or some yellowing over time, a well-made silver gelatin print can survive for well over a century. For photographers thinking about their legacy, or for publications building archives, black and white was simply more durable. It wasn’t until the 1980s that color print technology improved enough that prints showed little to no color shift or fading over time.
The Art World Dismissed Color
This is the biggest piece of the puzzle. Even setting aside cost and stability, the fine art photography establishment actively rejected color. Black and white had dominated the medium from its invention, and the titans of 20th-century photography, from Ansel Adams to Henri Cartier-Bresson to Robert Frank, all worked in black and white. The prevailing attitude was that stripping away color forced the viewer to focus on composition, light, shadow, and form. Color was seen as a distraction, something that made photographs look commercial or superficial.
Galleries rarely showed color work. Museums didn’t collect it. Critics didn’t take it seriously. Photography programs in universities taught black and white almost exclusively. This created a self-reinforcing cycle: aspiring art photographers shot in black and white because that’s what got exhibited, published, and praised.
The 1970s Color Revolution
Three photographers are widely credited with breaking that barrier: William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz. Working through the 1970s, they used color not for spectacle but to document ordinary American life: gas stations, motels, suburban backyards, diners, and small towns. Their approach proved that color could be just as thoughtful and intentional as black and white.
The turning point came in 1976, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted its first exhibition of color photography, featuring Eggleston’s work. The show was controversial. Many critics hated it. But it forced the conversation and established color as something the art world had to reckon with. Within a few years, color became not just accepted but central to contemporary photography.
Newspapers and Magazines Were Slow Too
Print media had its own practical reasons for sticking with black and white. Reproducing color on a printing press was far more expensive and technically demanding than black and white. Newspapers in particular relied on fast turnaround, and black and white was easier to shoot, develop, and reproduce on tight deadlines. Most major newspapers didn’t regularly print color photographs until the 1980s and 1990s, well after the technology was available, simply because the economics and workflow favored black and white.
Magazines adopted color earlier, especially for covers and advertisements, but editorial and documentary photography inside their pages often remained black and white through the 1960s. The images that defined news photography, war photography, and street photography from mid-century were almost all black and white, which reinforced the public impression that color photography barely existed before the 1970s.
Why It Looks Like Nobody Used Color
The short answer is survivorship bias. The photographs that ended up in museums, history books, and iconic photo essays were overwhelmingly black and white because those were the images the art world and media valued. Meanwhile, billions of color snapshots were sitting in family photo albums and shoeboxes, many of them fading. The color photographs that everyday people took weren’t preserved in archives or celebrated in galleries, so they’re largely invisible in the cultural record. Photographers used color plenty before 1970. The photography establishment just pretended they didn’t.