Philadelphia in Color : 1950-1990

"To see our beloved city with all its diverse and rich images I am sure will conjure the scent of cheesesteaks, the 'Sound of Philadelphia,' hot summer breezes, and so many faces of the people who are the heart of this keystone state."—Colman Domingo

Tracking the emergence of widespread color photography to the dawn of the digital age, Philadelphia in Color 1950-1990 features hundreds of street photographs, portraits, and family snapshots to document the evolution of architecture, fashion, and expression in American urban life. The depth and grandeur of human experience is recorded in more than 360 color images by more than 200 photographers—many never seen publicly. They are from the collections of famous photographers and architects, including Stephen Shore, Denise Scott Brown, Laurie Olin, and Harvey Finkle, as well as dozens of amateurs, many sourced from archives and family collections. Taken together, they express the passion, pride, resilience, endurance, and flamboyance of a city and its people.

Philadelphia in Color also tells a far more complicated story of how Philadelphians reinterpreted and redefined their city. In essays that contextualize the images, the editors recount how the people of Philadelphia experienced the dramatic economic, racial, and cultural shifts during these decades of deindustrialization and flight.

Philadelphia in Color fills a significant void in the city's visual history, while reframing the conversation about what kind of place Philadelphia was and might be. This is a civic portrait of Philadelphia as deep and dynamic as the city itself.