The Responsive Eye (1965). Exploration into "retinal" art. Amazing how it presaged cognitive and vision sciences current obsessions with optical illusions.
Color phtography was hardly easily available from the early 1900s. It would be theoretically possible for them to have shot in color, but it would have been expensive, inconvenient, and much harder to reproduce; most images were shot in black and white well through the 60s, and people were used to the format. It's like asking why they didn't preserve all their galleries in 3D VR starting from the 2000s; it would have been possible, but not worth it.
I didn't live during that period of time, but I wouldn't be surprised if the field had some recalcitrance for cultural reasons -- think of all the classic photography that is in black and white. B/W may have started as a technical limitation but it's something that could have become inextricably associated with "classic photography". On NPR today, they were interviewing the latest Sulzberger to take a leadership role at the New York Times (the Sulzbergers own the paper), and when asked about how the NYT will adapt to the technical changes, he talked about how even in his lifetime (he's only 35ish), the NYT heavily debated having color photos on its front page because it was unseemly (the first color front page photo was 1997 for the Gray Lady) [1]
From an artistic perspective, B/W photography absolutely has advantages from a dramatic perspective. Think of how we describe clear-cut situations as being black-and-white. In certain situations, the actual color in a scene can be extremely distracting and cut away from the photo's intended center.
Some of the early color photography is pretty stunning. I was watching a documentary on color photographs from WW1 using the Autochrome Lumière process the other day, and it was just incredible - it's hard to think of that era outside the black-and-whites and sepias that we usually see.
It wasn't until 1983 that half of American daily newspapers included some color[1]. It was probably not economical before that time to print the catalogs in color. And if you're not going to print them in color, it doesn't make sense to capture the images in color either.
>Color cameras only became common at the end of the 60s and beginning of the 70s
Huh? What is a "color camera"?
Kodachrome film was invented in the 1930s. It wasn't immediately commonplace and, yes, we still tend to think of the 40s and 50s largely in monochrome. But color slides were certainly common by the 60s.
What was true (and what you're seeing) is that news photo reproduction for print was primarily B&W. Therefore, most news and documentary photography was still done in B&W even after color was readily available for consumers.
1. https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2015/05/13/open-sour...