One day last year I was in the library at the International Center of Photography when someone I took to be a senior instructor wandered in and started flipping through a book among the new arrivals on the counter. “Gee,” he said to the librarian, “I really liked Ernst Haas until he started shooting in color.” I was shocked. To me, Ernst Haas was color, and I remember the excitement in the 1950s and 1960s when his color work was just becoming known. The first photo essay in color to run in Life magazine was the 24 pages they gave to “The Magic City,” his love poem to New York. The first exhibition of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962 was devoted to his work. What was this guy talking about?

Haas (1921-86) was a great black-and-white photographer, with a European visual sophistication similar to that of Henri Cartier-Bresson or Werner Bishof or Andre Kertesz, and the man passing time in the ICP library was certainly entitled to his opinion. But you can see what Haas wrought in color at ReCREATION, the Bruce Silverstein gallery’s remounting of the MoMA exhibition. These are the original prints from the show, and some of them have sustained damage over the years, little nicks and dings. The color of the dye transfer prints may not be as saturated as that available with contemporary techniques, but their beauty is undiminished. This is very attractive work, not less so for being so often imitated.

The first series of pictures features work in which Haas turned one of the liabilities of the early color film, its slow speed, into a positive advantage. In “Football, U.C.L.A., Los Angeles” (1961), a long shutter exposure let him follow a play down the field. Much is indistinct in the resulting image: The crowd is a totally indecipherable blur, the field markings are white smudges on the green grass, and although the torsos and helmets of the players are relatively clear, their running legs are a flurry of uniforms, socks, and cleats. It may not be possible to tell exactly what is happening here – an important criterion for the sports photography of the daily papers – but the excitement of the powerful bodies in motion is impossible to miss. We get the feel of the game, if not a narrative.

The same technique was used in “Sailboats, Regatta, California” (1957); “Cowboy and Bronco, New York” (1958); “Sea Gulls, Norway” (1959); and, most famously, in his pictures of bullfighting in Spain, three of which are on display. Picasso, a connoisseur of this blood sport, admired these pictures. Here the slow speed emphasizes the black mass of the bull, the speed of the lithe toreador, and the gorgeous colors of his twirling cape. “Toro, Pamplona, Spain” (1956) shows just the head and shoulders of the wounded bull against the golden sand of the ring, but the sun glistens sensually on the streaming red blood highlighting the passion of this ritualized Mediterranean spectacle that Americans are not expected to enjoy.

The rest of the exhibition, with the exception of some pictures of bodies of water, is of static objects. Haas showed himself a contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists in these studies of color and shape: The subjects are subsumed and gloried in the designs he made of objects taken both from nature and the discards of civilization. “Two Crushed Cans” (c. 1962) is a 20-by-31-inch print filled with two flattened soda or beer cans, their naked metal bluish gray against a yellow background, possibly the center stripe down a highway. This heralds much of what was to become Pop Art, although it is not cute but exquisite. This is even more so with “Holy Underwear, California” (1957), a rumpled, weathered pair of underpants against a rock.

Haas, his English not free of his Austrian background, described this photograph, “‘Holy Underwear’ is the very, very typical double-eight composition. It’s an underwear. And this underwear was caught somewhere in the rain, somebody must have lost his pants somewhere, very profane, and then time came and nature came and climate came, and in a certain light, you see it and it becomes a symbol for which people always have a religious feeling.” Most people see it as a crucifix: The “double-eight” is, I think, a complex knot with mystical connotations. Haas frequently went out of his way to photograph sacred sites, but his spiritual longings did not need cathedrals, temples, or stupas for its expression; anything with color would do.

“Green Wave, Mazatlan, Mexico” (1963) shows the point where a pale green ocean current meets a pale blue one: There are just the two colors and the different patterns of their waves. In “Eternity Stone, Utah” (1961), the piled strata of a golden rock are photographed from above with no reference to give a sense of scale. “Adam-Rock, Point Lobos, California” (1962), has a bluish cast, to which the setting sun gives yellow highlights: The figure is probably the accidental result of erosion, but Haas’s picture imbues it with the power of a prehistoric totem. “Ice and Rock” (c. 1963), “Bark of Tree” (c. 1960), “Drops in a Place of Coral” (1963), “Torn Poster – Red Bird, New York” (1960): The titles give you an idea of how prosaic his subjects were but not how startling the results.

There was plenty of precedent for Haas’s nature photos in the work of Edward Weston and Minor White, for his shredded posters in the work of Walker Evans, and for his close-ups of incidentals in the work of Aaron Siskind. But color transformed them. John Szarkowski, of the Museum of Modern Art, explained at the time, “The color in color photography has often seemed an irrelevant decorative screen between the viewer and the fact of the picture. Ernst Haas has resolved this conflict by making the color sensation itself the subject matter of his world. No photographer has worked more successfully to express the sheer physical joy of seeing.”

Tastes being what they are, there was no point in my quibbling in the ICP library with someone because he preferred Ernst Haas’s black-and-white photography. But I remembered that when I first saw his color, my response had been to shoot many, many a roll of Kodachrome.

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