William Eggleston, Mystery of the Ordinary

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Image courtesy of KBr Fundación MAPFRE.

Widely regarded as the father of color photography, having achieved recognition as a permissible artistic expression in art galleries and museums in the 1970s, William Eggleston (Memphis, 1939) is one of the most influential names in contemporary photography.

His apparently simple and straightforward images are always appealing. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” by Robert Frank and Eugène Atget, and after his initial work in black and white around the suburbs of Memphis, Eggleston began to photograph everything around him with a clear artistic intention and in color, as if with his images he sought to reveal the aesthetic potential of the quotidian: old shoes, freezers with food, the inside of a bathroom, a woman’s legs, a road sign, an old truck, a tree and so on. His work thus becomes an exciting recognition of life itself.

The exhibition devoted to him at MoMA in 1976 was the first in the institution’s history to feature exclusively color photography. In 1988 Eggleston received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award and in 2004 the PHotoEspaña Baume et Mercier Award. Mystery of the Ordinary is one of the most representative exhibitions of this exceptional photographer’s work to date in Spain. Organized chronologically, this extensive anthology includes his early black-and-white work and his entire subsequent career in color from 1965 on.

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