Eggleston, W.

Many of you have probably already seen this, but in case you haven't... it's actually quite better than I thought it'd be, and does go into the the behind the scenes history of both man and art. Eggleston, of course, was one of a very small handful of people who first popularized color photography in the photo art world. And his "democratic" style of photographing the banal and mundane were met both with massive fanfare, and criticism. I remember someone once described Reggae as "inside out Rock and Roll," and that's the visual equivalent of how Eggleston's work appeared to me at that time, way back Seventies' way- familiar, but different, in an inexplicably original way. Color photography had been around for decades, only... not like this!

Up until Eggleston, most color photography was just B&W with color added, or photos where the color really overpowered everything else (eg- abstractions). Eggleston somehow managed some kind of mystical, magical balance between content, composition and color that made his particular vision sing a different song!