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Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black-and-white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessor. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the ‘first color photographer,’ and the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of him.

Here are people, landscapes and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's home town of Memphis - an anonymous woman in a loudly patterned dress and cat's eye glasses sitting, left leg slightly raised, on an equally loud outdoor sofa; a coal-fired barbecue shooting up in flames, framed by a shiny silver tricycle; the curves of a gleaming black car fender, and someone's torso; a tiny, grey-haired lady in a faded, flowered housecoat, standing expectant, and dwarfed in the huge dark doorway of a mint-green room whose only visible furniture is a shaded lamp on an end table. For this edition of William Eggleston's Guide, The Museum of Modern Art has made new colour separations from the original 35mm slides, producing a facsimile edition in which the colour will be freshly responsive to the photographer's intentions.

Museum of modern art