William Eggleston

William Eggleston made ordinary Southern life central to fine-art color photography. His 1976 exhibition William Eggleston's Guide at MoMA was a landmark because it was the museum's first solo show devoted to color photography^*1. Shopping centers, gas stations, suburban houses, traffic lights, and ceilings with bare lightbulbs became part of what he called a democratic camera, one that refused to rank subjects by importance^*2. By adapting the dye-transfer process, he gave those ordinary scenes extraordinary chromatic intensity^*3. Work that once seemed trivial or offensive to critics later came to be recognized as one of the decisive shifts that moved color photography to the center of photographic history^*5.