In the 1960s, when to most people serious photography meant the black and white kind, William Eggleston decided there was something in the raucous orange of a rooftop sign or the strident red of a painted ceiling or the faintly nauseating green of a shower stall that black and white didn't tell you about. And for that matter, there was also a world of opportunity in the most unassuming corners of reality — that rooftop, that ceiling, that shower stall. By combining those two intuitions he has produced a great many pictures that get under your skin. There are scores of them in the Whitney's mighty retrospective, the first in the U.S. to chronicle the whole of Eggleston's career.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (11/7 – 1/25/09)