CUT THE RIBBON, WILLIAM EGGLESTON

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Editorial Staff

So who invented color photography? It’s William Eggleston, off course. Joking. Not that he invented anything, even if we really think that in a way he did, but this brilliant photographer born in Menphis in 1939, is widely credited with increasing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium to display in art galleries. And that’s not a small thing in a world where shooting in  black and withe was the only way for an artist to find his pictures exhibited in a gallery or a museum. Eggleston and his amazing colors, his democratic eye, his everyday life and objects: an ode to the “out of the blue” an example for hundreds of photographers that came after him. Eggleston’s work was exhibited for the first time at Washington  D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery and later at New York’s MoMA in 1976.  This exhibition came more or less 10 years  after MoMA had exhibited color photographs by Ernst Haas, but the tale that the Eggleston exhibition was MoMA’s first exhibition of color photography is frequently repeated and the 1976 show is regarded as a watershed moment in the history of photography, by marking “the acceptance of color photography by the highest validating institution”. Still alive and kicking, Eggleston is a Cut The Ribbon from his first photographs (in black and white) to his latest.