Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began
taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson's
The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black and white to color
film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his
esteemed predecessors. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of
photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the "first
color photographer, " and certainly the world in which we consider a
color photograph as art has changed because of Eggleston.
From 1966 to 1971, Eggleston would occasionally use a two and one
quarter inch format for photographs. These are collected and published
here for the first time, adding more classic Eggleston images to
photography's color canon.