Video: Thinking in Color – A Conversation with Bill Armstrong and W.M. Hunt

Excerpt from an event held at Aperture Gallery on March 18, 2013.

On March 18, 2013, acclaimed art photographer Bill Armstrong and collector, curator, and consultant W. M. Hunt presented “Thinking In Color,” a lively conversation on color photography. Taking inspiration from the book I Send You This Cadmium Red, which features correspondence between critic John Berger and artist John Christie, Hunt and Armstrong have initiated a dialogue about color in photography. Starting with Armstrong’s technical overview of color photography and its history, as well as Hunt’s observations about color and its empathic power, the exchange was a means for the longtime friends to challenge each other through their ideas.

Throughout their conversation at Aperture, Armstrong and Hunt offered thoughts about how color behaves, read from some of their written exchanges with each other, and took the audience on an unexpected and fresh journey through interpreting color in photographs.

Watch Part 2 of Thinking in Color: A Conversation with Bill Armstrong and W.M. Hunt

In 2011, Aperture published The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious, a catalog of anti-portraiture amassed over the course of thirty years by W. M. Hunt, which includes works by masters such as Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Imogen Cunningham, William Klein, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Robert Frank.

Bill Armstrong’s work was featured on the cover of The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (Aperture, 2009), author Lyle Rexer’s examination of abstraction at pivotal moments in photography.

Related article: Interview with Bill Armstrong