William Eggleston (born 1939) changed the course of colour photography by translating the intense, super-real quality of colour transparencies into the saturated hues of dye transfer prints. Adopting processes previously used in advertising – the dye transfer technique was predominantly commercial at the time – Eggleston set a precedent for colour documentary and art photography that remains influential today. His work pinpoints the moment when colour began to be generally accepted as part of the language of art photography, and his subtle choices of camera positions loosened up photographers’ ideas about viewpoint.

In the early 1970s Eggleston began to photograph the realities of his own landscape in the American South. He finds ‘the uncommonness of the commonplace’ in ordinary scenes and places, as photographer Raymond Moore described it. Inspired by family snapshots, he focuses on the everyday and the overlooked in order to reveal them as remarkable.