The tricycle is famous. It sits on the empty street in front of a Memphis ranch house. Paint flakes off the red-and-white handlebars and the blue seat.

William Eggleston photographed the trike sometime between 1969 and 1970, and it has since come to stand for small-town, retrograde, mid-century American South.

A print of the tricycle sold for $253,900 at Christie's New York four years ago. Now it's on the wall of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which is hosting the 69-year-old Eggleston's first U.S. retrospective.

The show is big, jumbled and dimly lit. And it's essential viewing — a collection of national portraits that are also ground-shifting works of art. For 50 years, Eggleston has snapped thousands of images of his birthplace, the Mississippi Delta, and other locales throughout the South and Southwest. In the process, he invented a photographic style that makes a virtue out of obscurity. He also makes despair look glamorous.

In one image taken in Jackson, Miss., a whippet-thin man with a big mustache and a worn T-shirt stares out from the back of a car; in another, a shrunken older woman in cat-eye glasses smokes as she sits on a battered outdoor chaise with floral cushions. Her high heels and flowery print dress can be seen on younger women in Brooklyn and Berlin this very minute.

CAPTURING AMERICAN ANOMIE

Eggleston was unusual for using color photography, which in the early 1960s was considered a tool for hobbyists, not artists. He initially dropped his negatives off at drugstore photo labs. Eventually, he moved on to highly color-saturated, dye-transfer prints. He took inspiration from Henri Cartier-Bresson and fellow Southern artist William Christenberry, as well as from the amateur snapshots he saw being developed at the drugstore.

The result was the exposure of a national mood that had little to do with rah-rah jingoism. Images of old men in motel rooms, condiments on a takeout counter and plastic farm animals lined up on a car hood all capture a homegrown anomie — a productive combination of laziness and restlessness. A 1976 show at the Museum of Modern Art brought him national attention and approbation.

For Eggleston, anything can be a picture, though that doesn't mean that just anything photographed any which way will do.

Eggleston is a formalist at heart. Everything is angles and shadows. "Near Greenwood, Mississippi" (c. 1971) is a close-up of two men and a woman lolling about a parked car. The trunk slices a triangle out of the sky, while bare feet propped up against the front door make another.

ESTABLISHING CONVENTIONS

Eggleston once said he didn't particularly like the places around him, and his eye can be unmerciful. Trash bags and discarded chains pile up around curbs; people in his pictures are inevitably tight-lipped and hollow-eyed. Yet some photographs are tender. An untitled 1975 image of two long-limbed, young women on a couch looks like a pre-Raphaelite painting.

In the exhibition, photographs are confusingly grouped by association. One wall is about the color of copper — in a woman's long red hair, in a rust-colored carpet — while another riffs on blue. Look for a while, though, and everything seems to be about solitude.

The exception is a riotous black-and-white video, "Stranded in Canton" (c. 1973-74). Harmonica players, long-haired Southern wits and toothless drunks wail away past midnight in an ambling, ad-libbed comedy piece.

Avoiding conventions of beauty, Eggleston established new ones. His more recent images look like those self-consciously casual fashion shoots that, in turn, imitate him. No surprise, then, that the show's sponsor is W magazine.