William Eggleston's style: the colour of nothing special
By Lucas · 13 October 2026 · 5 min read
William Eggleston's style in one sentence: he stood square to ordinary things and let their colour be the picture. That is the whole trick, and it is harder than it sounds. If you are working through the colour lessons in the school and his name keeps coming up, this is what the homework is about.
What happened in 1976
In the summer of 1976 the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed around 80 of his colour prints, under John Szarkowski, the museum's director of photography. Szarkowski also wrote the book that came with the show, William Eggleston's Guide, the museum's first publication on colour photography. Its 48 plates were chosen from a set of 375 pictures Eggleston finished in 1970, in Tennessee and northern Mississippi.
You will sometimes read that this was the first colour show at MoMA. It was not: Ernst Haas had a solo colour show there in 1962. What was new was the subject. Cars, tricycles, plain suburban houses. The prints were dye transfer, a commercial process normally used for advertising, which is why the colour looks so deep and so deliberate.
Why critics called it boring
Szarkowski called the pictures perfect. Hilton Kramer, reviewing the show in the New York Times, answered with the line people still quote:
Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.
Kramer described the subjects correctly and drew the wrong conclusion. Nothing in these pictures is dramatic, and that is the point. When the subject is plain, the only thing left to look at is how it was seen and how it is coloured.
Szarkowski had a sentence for it in the museum's own press release: photographers were beginning to work "as though the world itself existed in color". Not colour as a problem to solve or a layer to add. Colour as part of the thing.
Three habits worth borrowing
I call this Square, Choose, Leave. It is my summary of the stance, not his, and it fits in a pocket.
- Square. Stand parallel to the surface, camera level, no tilt for drama. A wall that stays flat reads as a field of colour. A wall that leans becomes a trapezium. In the Street lesson on walls and posters we hold the wall within two degrees of the frame edge.
- Choose. Before you lift the camera, say which colour the picture is about, in one sentence. If you cannot, you are photographing a place, not a colour.
- Leave. Do not move the crate, do not wait for prettier light, do not tidy the corner. A scene you improved is a scene about you.
What not to copy
Not his subjects. A tricycle on a Memphis street is his; a bus shelter in your town is yours. Not the dye-transfer look either: no preset will give it to you, and chasing it sends you to the editor instead of the street. Copy the stance. Where he stands, how little the camera tilts, how little he dresses things up.
Your homework this week
Find a painted or postered wall within ten minutes of your door. Stand three metres back with a 35mm lens, camera level. Before the first frame, write one sentence: which colour you chose and what it argues. Then wait until a head lands inside one quiet panel of the wall. One frame is enough.
In the school this is two lessons: Street C7, Skin of the City: Walls and Posters, for the square stance, and Fine Art C1, The Colour Dominant, for the sentence. In C1 you can write the sentence in the notes box and ask the reader what it actually claims, before you shoot.
Where to read more
The book to find is William Eggleston's Guide (Museum of Modern Art, 1976). Three places to start online: