Making color respectable: A William Eggleston exhibit

By Mark Feeney
Globe Staff

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera / Photographs and Video, 1961-2008: The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has organized this first career retrospective of the photographer's work.

It's hard to overstate the impact Eggleston has had on American photography.

His 1976 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, "William Eggleston's Guide," was a landmark. It's best remembered for demonstrating the suitability of color in art photography. (The Whitney show includes examples of Eggleston's early work in black and white.)

"Guide" was also important for showing a new vision of the American South, one in which suburban ranch houses mattered more than magnolia-scented mansions or sharecropper shacks. Finally, Eggleston brought a loving, unemphatic attention to bear on seemingly banal objects - a child's tricycle being the most famous example - and showed how visually memorable the unheroic could be.

Although Eggleston has taken his best-known work in and around Memphis, the Whitney show includes examples of his photographs from other places, most notably, his series on Los Alamos, N.M. Also of note is the retrospective's inclusion of the photographer's legendary long-form video from the early '70s, "Stranded in Canton."

Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., New York 212-570-3600
http://whitney.org/www/exhibition/eggleston.jsp
On view Nov. 7 through Jan. 25, 2009