In the 1960s, Eggleston experimented with color photography, at a time when only black-and-white photography was considered art. Credit: William Eggleston

In the 1960s, Eggleston experimented with color photography, at a time when only black-and-white photography was considered art.

In the 1960s, Eggleston experimented with color photography, at a time when only black-and-white photography was considered art. William Eggleston

When you thumb up a color-saturating Instagram filter for your shot of Mt. Hood over an airplane wing or your pastel-hued brunch cocktail, you have William Eggleston to thank. Those Instagram filters—to say nothing of the art world at large—might look a lot less colorful had he not experimented with color photography, an unpopular approach in a 1960s art world that still preferred tasteful black-and-white.

Eggleston’s work is the opposite: His saturated dye-transfer prints lend a sense of hyperrealism to everyday subjects like gas stations, neon signage, the teal and salmon interiors of diners—even something as seemingly un-evocative as a bare bulb anchoring a ceiling (it’s blood red, so pretty evocative as ceilings go).

This Saturday, March 26, 65 of Eggleston’s photographs will be on view at the Portland Art Museum, but in keeping with his experimentation, 23 of them are black-and-white images reprinted from his early archives. Ahead of PAM’s show, here’s what the museum’s curator of photography, Julia Dolan, told me about Eggleston’s influence on later artists like Cindy Sherman, the art world’s problem with color photography, and the distorting lens of our nostalgia for the ’50s and ’60s.