Cover - Leatherette and gilt titling

William Eggleston is often called the Father of Colour Photography. While he didn't invent it or popularise it, he is widely regarded as the photographer who brought serious colour photography into the maintream art world. In 1967, the young Eggleston approached John Szarkowski, who had just been appointed Director of Photography at MoMA, with a collection of his photography. These photos were unlike any Szarkowski had seen. As he later explained in the forward to William Eggleston's Guide, these "pictures of aunts and cousins and friends, of houses in the neighborhood and in neighboring neighborhoods, of local streets and side roads, local strangers, odd souvenirs, all of this appearing not at all as it might in a social document, but as it might in a diary, where the important meanings would be not public and general but private and esoteric". Eggleston's "Color Photographs" opened at MoMA in 1976, the first color exhibition in more than a decade. Accompanying the exhibition was William Eggleston's Guide, the museum's first colour photography publication.

Algiers, Louisiana

William Eggleston's Guide begins at home in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. The book itself is covered in what is commonly termed "leatherette", a kitschy fake leather that you might find on a photo album from a corner store. The first photograph of the book shows a front door. Once inside, we see a knee, the photographer's own one assumes, and a jigsaw on a small table. What follows is Eggleston guiding the viewer through the jigsaw of his daily life, showing his home, where he has come from, indeed who he is. With wit, warmth, and mystery, Eggleston describes his world in the American South by showing the ordinary, the banal, the mundane. By the time we see the last photograph in the book, the photographer's coat hooked on the back of a door, that jigsaw is complete and we feel we know Eggleston.

Memphis

With a little imagination, the Guide tells the story of a day in the life of Eggleston. As he leaves home he talks to children playing on the lawn, photographs a car in the driveway as a friend sits drinking a cup of tea. We see narrow slices of daily intrigues, two men stand by a car next to a river, a girl at a playhouse stares back. Innocent enough sights, or perhaps there is something else going on. Into town, past the Ritz and the King Cotton Beverage Co., then onto the outskirts and farms. Entering a newer town we see the icons of life, barbecues and concrete and tricycles. Dusk falls and the perfect American life turns sinister. A man stands naked with 'God' scrawled on the wall, another old man lazily holds a handgun between quilt and bedpan. Finally, a crumpled man slumped in an undecorated room, an awkward counterpoint to the immaculately preened and attired women earlier in the book. The dark underbelly of the perfect public life. Who is to say my imagination reflects Eggleston's intention? No one of course. As Szarkowski emphasises, verbal descriptions of these photographs are gratuitous. They are what they are and no more.

Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in background

What makes a Eggleston appeal to such a broad swathe of viewers? Many of his pictures look familiar, often of trivial moments, those private instants where elements of the everyday suddenly coalesce into something worth keeping. His eye is cinematic, rarely departing from the first-person viewpoint, simple balanced compositions often punctuated by a bright object. These are the things we all take photos of, but what distinguishes Eggleston is the perfect composition of what might otherwise seem like a private album. There is an element of voyeurism, we look through his eyes and see the icons of the everyday.

Eggleston titles this photograph simply "Memphis"

It is these same characteristics that fuel Eggleston's detractors. Famously, the New York Times piled scorn on Szarkowski's labelling of Eggleston's photography as "perfect". "Perfect? Perfectly bland, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly" wrote reviewer Hilton Kramer after viewing that 1976 show. In recent times, there have been moves from the European photographic royalty to downplay Eggleston's role in dragging colour photography into the gallery. Martin Parr champions the little known Dane Keld Helmer-Petersen who was photographing similar material in a similar way before Eggleston was born. And Ernst Haas is often over looked for his role in popularising colour photography.

Gilt lettering on spine

Today, Eggleston remains prolific and more popular than ever. His bright dye-transfer images of the icons of daily life continue to resonate with critics and the general public alike. His later monograph at once became more mundane and more colourful. William Eggleston's Guide, published in 1976, remains a rare book for the general public to find. A second edition was published in 2002 and is destined to become just as scarce in coming years. Grab yours while you can.

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