A beautifully presented overview of Eggleston's evolution and legacy, from early black-and-white work to his pioneering explorations in colour.
 
Although broadly available colour slide film reached the market in 1935, colour was associated with advertising and continued to be dismissed as commercial, vulgar and unartistic into the 1980s. Nevertheless, from the 1960s onwards, increasing numbers of photographers discovered its creative possibilities. Across a career spanning more than five decades, William Eggleston contributed substantially to this shift and influenced generations of successors.
 
Alongside Saul Leiter, Evelyn Hofer and Stephen Shore, Eggleston recognised colour's distinctive power to create images that continually challenge the everyday. He infused banality with the uncanny and mysterious, repeatedly investigating his immediate surroundings as though suspicious of his freezer's contents or the ketchup bottle on a diner counter, not to mention the guns appearing almost casually in many photographs. Mystery of the Ordinary traces this evolution from late-1950s black-and-white experiments with unconventional subjects and cropping to some of his most iconic colour images.
 
Born in Memphis in 1939, Eggleston received his first camera in 1957. His 1976 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art was a landmark. A retrospective followed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2008 and Munich's Haus der Kunst in 2009. His Steidl books include Chromes (2011), Los Alamos Revisited (2012), The Democratic Forest (2015), Election Eve (2017), Morals of Vision (2019), Flowers (2019), Polaroid SX-70 (2019) and The Outlands (2021).