For example, If I remember correctly, David Byrne said he liked the quality Eggleston's pictures had of admiring something and making fun of it at the same time. Eggleston would probably deny he's doing either. The making fun may be in the eye of the beholder reacting to the Southern subject matter.

If you look at Eggleston's pictures of, say, Dunkirk, France, the visual style is the same but the cultural triggers fall away, leaving you with an eerie stillness, a sense of watching things transcend themselves while remaining exactly what they are. Which is just another way of describing the spirituality you point to at the end of your piece.

Byrne invited Eggleston to the set of True Stories and, in the book that accompanied the movie, published some of the pictures Eggleston made in the vicinity. You have to hand it to Eggleston--he seems incorruptible. None of this brush with movie glamour or the hippest egghead rock star changed his pictures in the least. He just went out and found Eggleston pictures.

He's like a savant that way. Wherever you put him on the globe, he picks up his camera like the Energizer Bunny on 'ludes and starts reeling off casually brilliant, deceptively inimitable pictures.

What we've seen over the years is not even the tip of the iceberg. Which is why I hope the curator has stocked the Whitney show with lots of pictures we haven't seen before.