Behind the deceptive casualness of William Eggleston's Lecia style snapshots of fragments of reality that might otherwise go unregarded lies an acute and instinctive sense of colour and form that is grounded in a modernist aesthetic. 


Though Eggleston didn't invent colour photography he put it on the cultural map with his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. William Eggleston's Guide His 1976 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art--- William Eggleston's Guide ---has become a significant event; a milestone. Black and white were deemed to be the colors of photography.

The blurb to his current exhibition at Victoria Miro in London--21st Century says of these colourful or painterly common place pictures:

Eggleston's ground-breaking use of color was both controversial and celebrated at a time when black-and-white was standard for "art" photography. In the mid-1960's, color photography was mostly used for commercial advertisements and journalism, but had also become accessible to the average consumer, allowing people to take color snap shots of friends and family. Eggleston was deeply inspired by the unplanned compositions of "ordinary" pictures, and saw in them an ability to access an intimacy and narrative voice unguarded by the carefully planned exposures of art photography's prevailing canon. His images, some 40 years later, continue to offer an intimate and personal sensibility of the world he documents.