New York, May 1976. MoMA hangs color photographs on its famous white walls for the first time — a tricycle, a freezer, a bare light bulb — and people get angry.

The New York Times reportedly called it the most hated show of the year, and answered the curator's "perfect" with a sentence photographers still quote: perfectly banal, perhaps; perfectly boring, certainly. At the center of the fury stood a thirty-six-year-old Memphis aristocrat with no intention of apologizing. This is our first photographer story on the show — and I owe you a small confession about why he's first. This past January I happened to be in New York while William Eggleston: The Last Dyes was on, and I spent two or three hours giving every photograph as long as it asked for. The color doesn't sit on the paper. It comes up off it.

His story runs from wanti ...