artreview.com
Eggleston’s work shot to prominence in 1976 when the Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski invited him to exhibit a series of dye-transfer colour images. At the exhibition’s opening, the art critic Hilton Kramer condemned the photographs, writing in the New York Times, that they were ‘perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.’ In 1969, the photographer Walker Evans had declared that ‘colour photography is vulgar’, and although he later retracted the statement (saying in 1974 that he had bought a colour Polaroid and was ‘feeling wildly with it’), his original sentiment reflected the prevailing opinion at that time: that colour photography was more often associated with advertising than with art. Eggleston, who had nearly missed the opening of that MoMA show by falling asleep in his hotel room, has always said that the criticisms never bothered him – that he thought, instead, those critics hadn’t really looked at his photographs. The photographer, who grew up on his famil
over 7 years ago
