Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in Background, 1972

William Eggleston began photographing in black and white under the influence of his favorite photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Once he had incorporated his elder's sense of structured composition, he turned to the new challenge of photographing in color. In the introduction to William Eggleston's Guide, a manifesto for the acceptance of color photography as a mature art form, John Szarkowski wrote: "Reduced to monochrome, Eggleston's designs would be in fact almost static, almost as blandly resolved as the patterns seen in kaleidoscopes, but they are perceived in color, where the wedge of purple necktie , or the red disk of the stoplight against the sky, has a different compositional torque than its equivalent panchromatic gray, as well as a different meaning. For Eggleston, who was perhaps never fully committed to photography in black and white, the lesson would be more easily and naturally learned, enabling him to make these pictures: real photographs, bits lifted from the visceral world with such tact and cunning that they seem true, seen in color from corner to corner. (The Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p. 12) Considered in monochrome, the present lot has a compelling framework, the curvature of the men's arms repeat the form that eminates from the car door, but it is the color that brings it to life. Ingrid Sischy wrote about this photograph when it was reporduced on the front cover Artforum; "Using processed color with the modulation, the sense of even habit, with which a genre painter, a Chardin, used painted color (also to depict 'the commonplace'), he has found a way for light to have air in color, to breathe from it instead of be blocked by it-as usually happens in color photography. The color is so in key with Eggleston's vision of his subject, so matter-of-fact, that one could slip into not thinking about it. But it is the big wave on which all the infomation rides in. For example, the red-and-black-striped necktie, which was taken at a relatives funeral, is the wise blood of a picture sucking up color in its thorough dedication to the history of the subject of black and white (photography and people)." (Sischy, "Matters of Record", Artforum, February 1983, as quoted on p. 45 of Eggleston, Ancient and Modern, Random House, 1992.)