Stock photos unexpectedly inspired by the pioneer of contemporary color photography.

William Eggleston, along with Stephen Shore, Helen Levitt, Nan Goldin, Laurie Simmons and William Christenberry, is widely credited with legitimizing color photography in the art world from the 1970's onward. His influence continues to trickle into the work of many photographers today, including Tim Barber, Christian Patterson (who worked for Eggleston in the early 2000's), Beth Herzhaft, Mike Slack, Teju Cole and countless others. 

But one genre we don't commonly link him to is stock photography or "microstock." Despite its impressive creative and editorial evolution in recent years, it's often still associated with business concept tropes, visual absurdity, and the now-classic "women laughing alone with salad."

In my final days at Shutterstock, while digging through our digital archives, I discovered the following bounty of unexpectedly Eggleston-inspired stock photos. Consciously or not, these photographs embody his, and many other 1970's photographers' aesthetic, sensitivity to light and color, and "war with the obvious" attention to the everyday. They're particularly timely in advance of Eggleston's exhibition Los Alamos, which opens next week at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.