Red Ceiling

In the mid-1960s, William Eggleston created his first successful color photographs. These vivid, seemingly casual pictures of the mundane world around him caused a seismic rupture in the history of medium when they surfaced in a 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Their appearance at MoMA arguably marked the beginning of modern color photography.

Eggleston, born in Memphis and raised in Mississippi, worked as though “the Mississippi Delta was the center of the cosmos.” Family, friends, lovers, neighborhoods, and local hang-outs in his native South served as frequent subject matter. In Red Ceiling, Eggleston photographed the blood-red room inside the home of his best friend, a dentist from Greenwood, Mississippi named TC Boring.

The abstract “fly’s eye view” of the room evokes how Eggleston’s compositions often appear both formal and deceptively simple. His reverence for the dye transfer process, which offers greater control of color saturation, aids the vibrancy of the red in the image. Eggleston once compared the making of this print to “a Bach exercise…because I knew that red was the most difficult color to work with… I don't know of any totally red pictures, except in advertising. The photograph is still powerful. It shocks you every time.”