Joel Sternfeld — American Photographer born on June 30, 1944,

Joel Sternfeld is a fine-art color photographer noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and helping establish color photography as a respected artistic medium. He has many works in the permanent collections of the MOMA in New York City and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He has influenced a generation of color photographers, including Andreas Gursky, who borrows many of Sternfeld's techniques and approaches... (wikipedia)

Black and white is abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.
The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.
Photography has always been capable of manipulation.
A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.
Some people consider utopia to be derived from nature. For some people, utopia is the city.