Critics reacted with derision when William Eggleston's photographs first appeared at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1976. It wasn't just the use of colour that turned them off - though until then art photography was generally confined to black and white. They simply despised Eggleston's seeming nonchalance, his willingness to turn just about anything, from a mucky green-tiled shower stall to the grey-blue insides of an empty oven, into art. "A mess," one detractor sneered; another dismissed his work as "erratic and ramshackle".

It's hard in hindsight to understand what led these writers so far astray. Looking at Eggleston's photos in the gorgeous, captivating new Whitney retrospective, there's just no disputing their aesthetic authority or their eerie power. Eggleston's approach may appear random, but every photo subscribes to a meticulous logic. Even so, compositional rigour is only part of what will glue these pictures to your memory and haunt you long after you've left the museum. The shower, the oven, the ketchup bottles and the pinball machines all capture the inadvertent, even perverse, poetry of the specific and the mundane. At the dark heart of Eggleston's enterprise lies a mixture of tenderness and contempt for the time and place he inherited and consummately claimed as his own: the American South in the latter half of the 20th century.