As LACMA prepares for the 2026 public opening of the new David Geffen Galleries, the future home of the museum’s permanent collection spanning a breadth of eras and cultures, we’re sharing 50 iconic artworks that will be on view in the building over the next 50 weeks in the series 50 Works 50 Week

William Eggleston is known as a pioneer of color photography. Working in color since the late 1960s, it was his 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that introduced his work to a larger audience and helped to establish that color photography was no longer intended solely for commercial applications. Color went beyond description and decoration in fine art photography instead becoming a key factor in the picture's content. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, on the family cotton farm, much of Eggleston’s work is made in southern locales. Portraits, interiors, architecture, and landscapes are at the core of his visual vocabulary, but he directs his camera in unusual ways—oblique angles and off-kilter perspectives—that tend to abstract the scene. Untitled, made in the early 2000s, is an upward glance at white puffy clouds against an impossibly blue sky. This composition visually calls back to Alfred Stieglitz’s early 20th century photographs of clouds, which he called Equivalents, that marked the first foray into intentional photographic abstraction.

In addition to his harmoniously composed photographs, the artist has engaged with music for most of his life. Eggleston has been playing the piano since the age of four, calling it his first love, and continues to play daily as a form of meditation. In 2017 he released his debut album, titled Musik, which includes a collection of recordings he has made since the 1980s. Thirteen tracks, taken originally from 49 floppy disks, were remastered by producer Tom Lunt and include improvisations on Bach, Handel, Gilbert and Sullivan, and jazz standards. Film director David Lynch has described it as “music of wild joy with freedom and bright, vivid colours”, which quite literally relates back to his achievements in photography.