The Democratic Camera

Born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in the Mississippi Delta, William Eggleston's large format dye-transfer color photographs are largely responsible for the acceptance of color photography into the art world. When he switched to color in the late 1960s and created a series of portraits in the early/mid-1970s for a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, he ruffled quite a few feathers on his contemporary art critics, for whom color photography was merely a method of the banal - used commercially for selling cigarettes, soft drinks, beauty products and liquor, and by then widely used in the requisite family photo album for personal snapshots.
Certainly not Fine Art.

His work showcases the often dark and strange underlying nuances of the American South and its changing pace of life; time capsules stuffed with frozen moments of the everyday, carefully considered compositions highlighted in saturated colors.

"[Eggleston's] subjects are, on the surface, the ordinary inhabitants and environs of suburban Memphis and Mississippi - friends, family, barbecues, back yards, a tricycle and the clutter of the mundane. The normality of these subjects is deceptive, for behind the images there is a sense of lurking danger." (Mark Holburn, Ancient and Modern).

As writer and fellow photographer Eudora Welty notes, "They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!"