Sally Eauclaire

Sally Eauclaire emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as one of the most perceptive and influential voices in the critical discourse surrounding colour photography at a moment when the medium was undergoing a profound transformation. For decades, serious art photography had been almost exclusively associated with black-and-white imagery. Colour was dismissed by the fine-art establishment as the province of commercial work, advertising, and amateur snapshots — technically impressive, perhaps, but aesthetically suspect, too closely tied to the real world's surface appearances to achieve the formal abstraction and emotional gravity that critics associated with artistic seriousness. Eauclaire's great contribution was to challenge this orthodoxy with intelligence, rigour, and a genuine passion for the new work being produced by a generation of photographers who had embraced colour as their primary medium.

Her most significant publication, The New Color Photography, appeared in 1981 and immediately established itself as the definitive survey of the colour revolution that had been gathering momentum throughout the 1970s. The book presented the work of photographers such as William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld, and Jan Groover within a critical framework that took their use of colour seriously as an artistic choice rather than a mere technical convenience. Eauclaire argued that these photographers were not simply adding colour to established photographic traditions but were fundamentally rethinking what a photograph could be and how it could engage with the world.

What distinguished Eauclaire's criticism from much of the writing about photography at the time was her willingness to engage directly with the formal properties of colour itself. She wrote about hue, saturation, and luminosity with the same precision and sophistication that art critics brought to discussions of paint and pigment, and she understood that colour in photography was not a neutral addition but a transformative element that altered the relationship between the image and its subject. Her essays explored how colour could flatten or deepen pictorial space, how it could establish mood and atmosphere, and how it could draw attention to aspects of the everyday world that black-and-white photography had rendered invisible.

The follow-up volume, New Color / New Work, published in 1984, extended the conversation to include a broader range of practitioners and a more diverse set of approaches to colour. Where the first book had focused primarily on photographers working in a documentary or straight tradition, the second cast a wider net, encompassing conceptual artists, studio practitioners, and photographers whose work blurred the boundaries between photography and other visual arts. Eauclaire's introductions and essays for these volumes remain among the most lucid and insightful accounts of the colour photography movement ever written.

Beyond her publishing work, Eauclaire was active as a curator and lecturer, organising exhibitions that brought together colour photographers whose work was scattered across different galleries and institutions. She played a crucial role in creating a sense of coherence and community among artists who might otherwise have been seen as isolated practitioners, and her curatorial work helped to establish colour photography as a recognisable movement with its own history, its own aesthetic principles, and its own critical vocabulary.

Eauclaire's influence on the reception and understanding of colour photography cannot be overstated. Before her publications, there existed no comprehensive, critically serious survey of the new colour work. The books she produced provided curators, collectors, educators, and fellow photographers with a framework for understanding what was, at the time, still a contested and poorly understood area of photographic practice. Her writing helped to move colour photography from the margins of the art world to its centre, paving the way for the widespread acceptance of colour that is now taken for granted in contemporary art photography.