William Eggleston: Democratic Camera

William Eggleston’s color-saturated photographs turn the familiar into the foreign, the mundane into the marvelous. Over the past five decades he has used the camera as a democratic device, recording the ordinariness of life in America, particularly in the South, and finding something thrilling, enigmatic, scintillating in the smallest detail or the composition of characters in space.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera—Photographs and Video, 1961–2008, now on show at LACMA, is the most comprehensive exhibition on the photographer's work to date. As well as more than two hundred photographs, including his early black-and-white photographs of the sixties and the vivid dye-transfer work of the early seventies, the exhibition offers a chance to see his little-known video work Stranded in Canton. Further highlights from the last twenty years include selections from the Graceland series and The Democratic Forest, Eggleston's great, dense anthology of the quotidian. The current exhibition includes a special selection of recent work taken in Los Angeles.