William Eggleston at Victoria Miro Gallery

Untitled (Palm Tree Trunk, Green Wall, Cuba),” 2007, by William Eggleston, image from Cheim & Read, New York

I took the afternoon on Wednesday to go to see this exhibition with my friend Ivan (who’s a top art director).

It was, in a word, sublime.

Eggleston’s photographs demand your complete attention. In repro in magazines and newspapers or books, they’re easily glossed over. But as large prints in an amazing gallery space, they command your attention and draw you in. Each one tells a story – life always seems to be happening somewhere just out of shot and that’s the genius in it. One shot shows some dresses in a window, blurred and yellowed behind sunshades. But the world you can see in the reflection of the window tells a whole different story.

There are details upon details that draw you in. They are unsettling and disturbing while being strangely comforting because they dwell on the ordinary. Scenes and details that you might overlook are centre stage. The disconcerting nature of the ordinary makes you think hard about your environment. Rarely do people look closely at what is around them. The new and pristine becomes the bashed and lived-in. The extra-ordinary becomes the accepted. But you don't notice it. Look at the walls around your home – how many of the pictures do you look at, really look at, every day? How much of it is just ‘furniture’? Eggleston questions all of this and finds beauty in a dumpster or a flawed wall of mosaic tiles.

There is an elegiac quality to all this, the sacred in the ordinary. It’s that feeling I get in big cities when I look up – suddenly your eye is drawn to the unexpected architectural detail, the shock of an arc of rainbow mosaic on an arched window in Regent Street or an indigo-enamelled Edwardian Street sign with its simple postcode.

I always feel privileged to look over Eggleston’s shoulder. If you get the chance, get yourself up to Victoria Miro gallery before 27 February. (The gallery itself is worth the visit.) When you’re done, walk down past the surprise of the City Basin to the Eagle and have a pint and a sandwich – it’s the pub from the kids’ rhyme ‘Pop goes the weasel’:

Up and down the City Road

In and out the Eagle

That's the way the money goes

Pop! goes the weasel.

Ivan and I enjoyed a couple of pints of London Pride and a long chat about Eggleston, Smash Hits and all sorts of other stuff that I'll no doubt write about at some point.