Eggleston began taking pictures in the 1960s. He was the first person to treat casual snapshots as real artwork. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book, The Decisive Moment, he is interested in quintessential American subjects. Early photographs are from road trips he has taken. He lives and works in Memphis, TN and most of his subjects are of the South. I particularly love the image of a Nehi bottle half-empty on the hood of a car from the Los Alamos series as well as the one of two ketchup bottles and salt and pepper shaker on the corner edge of a counter.

Eggleston used color photography as an art form—previously this had not been done and it was not really until after his 1976 MoMA exhibition that he began to get the notoriety he deserved. His work is about “the strange beauty of the familiar and unfamiliar.”