A William Eggleston retrospective opens today at the Whitney Museum.
Here is a blog post from 2003 questioning Slate magazine's heralding of him as the "father of color photography."
This was back when yrs truly wrote long discursive art articles in blog form.
In a nutshell I argued that color was happening anyway in '75-'80, and the big breakthrough came as the result of the shift from "art photography" to "artists with cameras," not because MOMA curator (and black and white purist) John Szarkowski was convinced by Eggleston.
I think this lonely dissent holds up, readingwise, even though it is spitting into the urban legend cyclone.
Was happy to see that Holland Cotter downplayed WE's pivotal-ness (pivotality?) vis a vis color in the show's NY Times write up today.
A followup post to "Not Color's Dad" is here.