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Now 87, William Eggleston is named the “Godfather of Color Photography” for serving to set up it as a legit, high-art medium. But that was in no way a simple process, as a brand new exhibition in London, England, reminds us.
William Eggleston: All That Goes Unnoticed, which runs at The Photographers’ Gallery from October to February, is a career-spanning have a look at the American photographer’s 60 years behind the digicam. And it pulls collectively most of the photos you might already acknowledge.
The rusted kid’s tricycle; the one bulb hanging from a blood-red ceiling; a grocery store employee leaning over a practice of trolleys – all are shot with the identical democratic consideration that Eggleston gave to all the pieces he pointed his lens at.
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He printed many of those photographs utilizing dye-transfer – a laborious course of borrowed from promoting, the place it was usually used to make merchandise look shiny and fascinating. He referred to as himself “at war with the obvious”.
Dye-transfer prints have been, it should be famous, expensive and painstaking, the form of course of a studio would reserve for a whisky advert or a automobile brochure; something that wanted to look irresistible.
Eggleston pointed that very same costly precision on the stuff of on a regular basis life. At the time, this was completely revolutionary – and never everybody was prepared for it.
When these pictures were first shown, at MoMA in 1976, the critical response was brutal. New York Times critic Hilton Kramer wrote about that show: “Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.”
He went on to describe Eggleston’s family and friends as “dismal figures inhabiting a commonplace world of little visual interest.” Another Times writer, Gene Thornton, reportedly voted it the most hated show of the year.
They weren’t, it must be said, out of step with the general opinion of the time. Color photography itself was still widely seen as a commercial medium unfit for a museum wall; only monochrome was acceptable if you wished to create art.
Eggleston’s subject matter, too – tricycles, oven interiors, a dog drinking from a puddle – were seen as entirely the wrong things to photograph.
Fifty years on, in retrospect, that backlash seems odd to us. But then again, half a century’s worth of photographers have since made a habit of applying serious color to unserious subjects.
Eggleston got there first. He got the bad reviews so that others could follow in his wake and get praiseworthy ones.
Wandering into a London gallery in 2026 – ticket in hand, catalog essay – it’s strange to forget that any of this was ever contested. The photographs haven’t changed since 1976. It’s the eye looking at them that needed time to catch up.
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