Eggleston’s uses of color insult intellectual values that long defined modern photography, including the work of his early heroes Cartier-Bresson and Evans. Carefully modulated black-and-white tonality conduces to mental as well as optical clarity; color befuddles. Eggleston’s receptiveness to chromatic profusion extends to a sense of space that spills beyond the limits of the framing edge. One of his best-known pictures shows a besuited white man outdoors with a deferential black servant. The tacit social commentary founders in surrounding details which surely any other photographer would have cropped out. At the show, I was mildly shocked to realize that my own memory had edited the image in exactly that way, framing a meaning that Eggleston’s actual composition, while not denying it, fastidiously de-emphasizes. He’s an aesthete, not a propagandist. His great subject is the too-muchness of the real. He does regularly suppress one significant element of lived experience: time. His art re-proves Roland Barthes’s influential theory of the punctum—a Proustian quantum of lost time—as intrinsic to photography’s emotional power. The hour on Eggleston’s clock is always right now. Whatever is dated in his early subjects—car models, hairdos—barges into the present with a redolence of William Faulkner’s famous remark that the past isn’t only not dead, it isn’t even past.