Shiloh National Military Park, Pittsburgh Landing, Tennessee

Since the early 1960s, William Eggleston has pursued a straightforward approach to common subjects and everyday life through his use of the so called snapshot aesthetic. He is best known, however, as a pioneer of color photography, which he took up later that decade “I had wanted to see a lot of things in color because the world is in color,” he explained. Importantly, Eggleston’s photographs of his hometown of Memphis, the small towns of the Mississippi Delta, and other places in the American South make vivid the ordinary or otherwise overlooked by offering them up as symbols of American culture. This image was taken at Shiloh National Military Park, site of one of the Civil War’s bloodiest battles, which took place April 6–7, 1862.