The Black and White Pictures

William Eggleston is synonymous with color photography--or so we think. But the man who almost single-handedly established color photography in the art world with his 1976 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, "William Eggleston's Guide, started out as a black-and-white photographer. It was in the early 1960s that Eggleston first took to the camera, after discovering the work of Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and it was their black-and-white aesthetic that opened his lens. "Precolor presents Eggleston's never-before published black-and-white work, a roadmap for his later hyper-saturated color oeuvre. Eggleston's passion for everyday life, for the uncanny beauty of the mundane, is already evident in his black-and-white photographs. Whether it's a stack of metal chairs, a man at a pay phone, a child perched on a tree, or a teenager on a street corner--Eggleston captures them all with an off-hand elegance, casually endowing the most seemingly insignificant glimpses of life with substance and urgency.