Photographer William Eggleston, born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939, is one of the few surviving representatives of a vanished culture.

With his color photographs he revolutionized an entire genre in the 1960s.

Before Eggleston, fine art photographers were people who created black and white images of special or meaningful moments.

From the mid-1960s, Eggleston used the colors in his photographs to tell a lot about the America of his time;

in one of his pictures, the bright red artificial leather interior of a new road cruiser stands out almost painfully.

The red color becomes the image of American consumerism and the seductive power of product design, which by the next year has already lost all its magic;

the not so old car wrecks with their expressive fins,

Tangle of telephone wires

Nicholas Mak

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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In addition to the color, it is in the previously unworthy of a picture that Eggleston finds the great stories of his time.

One picture shows the inextricable tangle of cords from a telephone and a vacuum cleaner, and the longer one looks at these things, which Eggleston formally composes like the elements of a classic still life, the more clearly the abysses of life in the suburban bungalows emerge.

The madness behind the perfect surfaces is just as visible in Eggleston's photography as the sudden beauty of everyday things in the American desert light.

One of his paintings shows a man standing at the back of his car, holding the fuel nozzle at the ready as if he were a cowboy ready to fire: a picture of the bliss of the petromodern.

Today such or similar pictures,

who photograph anonymous people in treacherous moments, as Robert Frank did in particular, fail because of the personal rights of the people shown.

For this reason alone they appear as a historical chapter in the history of photography.

The photography institute c/o Berlin has now managed to organize one of the largest Eggleston exhibitions in a long time, in which newly created series of works and previously unknown Berlin shots can be seen (until May 4th).

It would be an event in itself.

It is all the more exciting that the curators are juxtaposing Eggleston's historical view of the high points of American consumer modernism with the images of the photographer Anastasia Samoylova, who was born in the Soviet Union in 1984 and is now taking photos in Florida.

In her photographs she shows, so to speak, the consequences of the world that Eggleston devoted herself to as a young photographer.

An America suffering from climate change: streets swept away by the flood, comfort lounge chairs floating in the water, an alligator being kept from drying out with a trickle of water,

High-rise buildings, of which one does not know whether they are being built in a tropical jungle or whether the ruins of concrete modernism are being brought back;

too much water, too much drought, too tanned bodies next to fake antiquities that are too white.

On closer inspection, the people seen in the recordings turn out to be illusions.

Behind a chain link fence, a man tenderly puts a necklace on a woman.

It's only later that you realize that an advertising poster was just cleared away and that the real people have long since left this place.