Bruce Silverstein Gallery presents Frank Paulin: Unseen Color, 1956 - 2008, the gallery's fourth exhibition of work by Frank Paulin (1926-2016) and the first devoted exclusively to the artist's color photographs. Featuring twenty works spanning more than five decades, from 1956 to 2008, this exhibition reveals a body of work that remained virtually unknown during the artist's lifetime. Shot on color film beginning in the mid-1950s, these photographs were not printed until late in the artist's career, making this presentation a unique opportunity to reconsider the history of early color street photography in America.
Paulin is widely recognized for his black-and-white street photographs of New York City, work that earned admiring reviews in the New York Times and the Village Voice when it was first exhibited at Helen Gee's pioneering Limelight Gallery in 1957. What has remained largely hidden is that Paulin was simultaneously working in color, producing images of remarkable visual complexity on the streets of Times Square, Fifth Avenue, Central Park, and beyond.
These color photographs, made two full decades before William Eggleston's landmark 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that established color as a legitimate fine art medium, place Paulin among the earliest practitioners of color street photography in the United States, alongside contemporaries Saul Leiter, Ernst Haas, and Ruth Orkin.
