Eggleston belongs to a generation of Americans who elevated photography to the rank of a major art.
A legion of those who had elevated photography — Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Yousuf Karsh, Arnold Newman, Gordon Parks, Helen Levitt, Irving Penn — seemed to die en masse.
"Icons of 20th Century Photography" contains works by masters who helped elevate photography to the status of fine art, including include Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Alfred Stieglitz.
Did he care about elevating photography to an art form at a time when it was still in its infancy and considered vastly inferior to painting?
For many years, Ivan Dimitri, director of the National Advisory Committee of Photograph in Fine Arts, had one distinctive goal: to elevate photography's status, encouraging critics, collectors, gallery owners and curators to put it on the same level as painting or sculpture.
It was an art-for-art's-sake movement, an attempt to elevate photography and prove there was more to it than what the man in the street could produce with a Kodak.
The critic Andy Grundberg, writing about the 1987 retrospective for The New York Times, credited Ms. Groover with helping to elevate photography from its second-class status in the fine-art world.
It's very hard to elevate photography but there are always people who are passionate about, driven by, and are obsessed with photography and through time, they get better and better.
Eggleston elevated colour photography to a fine art in his large-scale pictures of everyday, common places, people, and things often found in public or on the street.
Therein, too, of course, may lie their fascination for a contemporary art world that elevates photography about photography.
"The new photography centre, along with the 2022 extension, will not only elevate photography but it will help foster new artists, patrons and collectors like myself.
