Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to present Frank Paulin: Unseen Color, 1956 to 2008, the gallery’s fourth exhibition devoted to the work of Frank Paulin (1926 to 2016), and the first to focus exclusively on his color photographs. Twenty works span more than five decades, from 1956 to 2008, and together they bring to light a body of work that stayed almost entirely unseen during the artist’s lifetime.
Paulin began shooting on color film in the mid 1950s, but he didn’t print most of these images until much later in his career. That makes this show a rare chance to look again at the early history of color street photography in America. Paulin is best known for his black and white pictures of New York City, the kind of street work that earned him glowing reviews in the New York Times and the Village Voice when it was first shown at Helen Gee’s Limelight Gallery back in 1957. What very few people realized at the time was that he was working in color too, quietly building a body of images full of visual complexity, shot on the streets of Times Square, Fifth Avenue, Central Park, and beyond.
These photographs predate William Eggleston’s celebrated 1976 show at MoMA, the exhibition usually credited with making color a serious medium for fine art photography, by two decades. That puts Paulin among the earliest people working in color on American streets, in the same company as Saul Leiter, Ernst Haas, and Ruth Orkin.
You can see Paulin’s training at work in these color photographs. His background in fashion illustration gave him an eye for style and gesture, for the energy of New York and the people who fill its streets. His Bauhaus education at Chicago’s Institute of Design gave him the tools to read the city as a field of overlapping planes, reflections, and collisions of text and image. What results is a kind of visual montage: shop windows turn into screens layering the street against what’s on display inside, neon light bleeds across people’s faces, revolving doors fold the city into fragments, almost like a kaleidoscope.
