Sotheby's: Postwar and Contemporary Photographs

Native Southerner William Eggleston's photographs monumentalize everyday subject matter, such as motel rooms and storefronts, in eccentric, refined compositions. Each detail is important, potentially carrying beauty and mystery. The main catalyst for New American Color Photography, Eggleston is largely credited with legitimizing color photography (especially with the dye transfer process) as a fine art form. Teaching himself from books of prints by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, he began photographing his environment in the 1950s but turned to color, then used largely only commercially, in the late 1960s. Eggleston's 1976 "Color Photographs" show at the Museum of Modern Art was groundbreaking for its striking, saturated color but also for his observational style, often deemed "democratic."