iThe Photographers' GallerySoho
Major exhibition celebrating 50 years since William Eggleston's Guide (1976), the book that helped establish colour photography as fine art.
A single bulb hangs from a ceiling painted blood red. Eggleston printed pictures like that one by dye transfer, the costly process studios kept for whisky adverts and car brochures, and he spent it on a rusted child's tricycle too. Both are here, in a show marking 50 years since William Eggleston's Guide and its 1976 MoMA exhibition.
Reviewing that MoMA show in 1976, Hilton Kramer called it "Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly." This show hangs the Guide pictures with rarely seen vintage dye-transfer prints and series including Graceland (1983), Coca-Cola (1995) and Los Alamos, plus black-and-white and Brownie pictures from before colour took over. You get burger bars, supermarkets and petrol stations given the same weight as Graceland.
Time Out gave it four stars and called it "banal, and extraordinary", though "we don't learn an awful lot about Eggleston". Tickets are £14 at the door or £12 online, including a £2 donation, and one ticket covers every show that day. It's open until 20:00 Thursdays and Fridays.
The red ceiling
Look up at a single bare bulb hanging from a ceiling painted blood red, one of the domestic scenes from the Guide years.
The tricycle
A rusted, abandoned child's tricycle, given the same weight Eggleston gave Graceland and Cadillac.
The supermarket worker
A worker leans over a long train of shopping trolleys, the kind of everyday scene critics in 1976 thought not worth photographing.
The diner bouffant
Look for the back of a woman's head in a diner booth, with three shining studs set into her bouffant.
Before Colour and Brownie pictures
Black-and-white and Brownie snapshots from the 1960s and early 70s, where his eye for ordinary life shows up before colour did.
You want the man behind the pictures: Time Out found the show says little about Eggleston's life.
Under-18s go free, and the same ticket covers Snap Happy!, a show about children as photographers.