William Eggleston: All That Goes Unnoticed
When William Eggleston’s photographs were shown at New York’s MoMA gallery in 1976, the reaction was mixed. It was ‘the most hated show of the year,’ according to the New York Times. ‘Just plain dull,’ said one review. ‘Perfectly boring,’ wrote another.
Why all the hooha? Well, for one thing, Eggleston’s photographs are, on one level, boring. That is to say, they show boring things. Eggleston’s ‘democratic photography’ was about photographing your environment: a trash can, say, or that pink toilet in the bathroom. The sort of photograph your dad looks at and says, ‘I could've taken that!’
But such quotidian subjects had been photographed before. The real reason behind the critical commotion was that Eggleston had shot his work in colour. MoMA had shown colour photographs before, but Eggleston’s show represented a new era. Colour was no longer just for tacky magazine spreads. Now, it was art. And people weren’t happy.
The exhibition celebrates Eggleston’s work in all its saturated ordinariness
The years since have been kinder. Eggleston’s work has been exhibited in countless retrospectives, the latest being All That Goes Unnoticed, now open at The Photographers’ Gallery. The show gives a broad overview of Eggleston’s career, including a wall of early black-and-white images from when he was still developing his eye. Coming 50 years after that notorious MoMA debut, the exhibition celebrates Eggleston’s work in all its saturated ordinariness: the gas stations, the abandoned...