William Eggleston (b. 1939)

Shot with a characteristically tight frame and humming with warm golds and oranges, (Untitled) Hot Springs, Arkansas, (Untitled) Kentucky and (Untitled) Memphis, Tennessee (2004) showcase William Eggleston’s virtuosic ability to find strange and wonderful compositional power in the everyday objects that accumulate and accrete across the American landscape: a worn model of a deer is frozen in the light of the camera; a sign advertising construction work gives an atmospheric opulence to an empty lobby; a light bulb irradiates the forgotten detritus lying around a grubby kitchen. Though best known for his luminous treatment of colour, these are photographs that also demonstrate Eggleston’s skilful handling of light. The deer’s head is treated with sombre chiaroscuro, giving its features a strange and unexpected solemnity, while the kitchen’s exposed bulb emits a harsh, sharp light that throws corners of the room into ominous shade. Meanwhile the mirrored words of the sign, their semantic meaning obscured by the photographer’s crop, are transformed into shapes that shimmer with a liquid, fiery gold. Often referred to as the father of colour photography, William Eggleston’s vivid representations of small town Southern America paved the way for a generation of photographers, both in their technological innovation and their painterly, surreal presentations of the mundane. Emerging in the 1970s, Eggleston’s work was initially poorly received; with black and white considered the only acceptable medium for art photography, the artist’s dye-transfer photographs – oddly framed, non-narrative images of America drenched in lurid colour – went against the grain of canonical taste. But eventually Eggleston’s vision would prevail, and today his influence over modern luminaries of photography like Martin Parr, Nan Goldin and Joel Sternfeld is clear.