The first thing that hits you, of course, is the color. Hyper-azure Mississippi skies that go on forever, the hypnotic blood red ceiling in William Eggleston’s most famous image, the inside of an oven rendered in bottomless midnight blue. Those rich dye-transfers that helped drag color photography into the serious art world, that so clearly informs the aesthetic of film directors like Sofia Coppola and Gus Van Sant. Yet William Eggleston’s photography — as evidenced by his massive Democratic Camera retrospective, now open at the Whitney — is about much more than just the visceral pull of his astonishing palette.

There’s the nostalgic, kitschy allure of all the 1970s Americana — the old lady in the hideous floral dress, sitting implacable on an equally vile floral couch, the slack-jawed and bequiffed teen supermarket worker — and the air of pathos that undercuts it. There’s the sense that Eggleston’s democratic camera, while frequently finding absurdity in the ordinary, never displays the meanness of spirit you find in, say, Diane Arbus’s portraits of assorted freaks and geeks.

There’s the earlier black and white photographs that captured Eggleston’s loose compositional craft, the happy but never too perfect juxtaposition of unremarkable objects in a remarkable whole, even before the switch to color secured his legacy. (In its own quiet way, a grainy view from a rear car window, gazing down an endless rural road, empty but for a single vehicle, its one busted headlight frozen in a melancholy wink, is as arresting as any of his grand, color-saturated masterpieces.)

There’s the social conscience, never overt, but, like Walker Evans before him, expressed in a reserved artistic formalism: barefoot African-American children feel glimpsed, rather than imbued with explicit meaning, the rumpled, defeated businessman in the impossibly lonely motel room is viewed at arms length, his sadness ambiguous. And there’s the simple satisfaction of snapshots — the cocktail glinting in the light that streams through the airplane window — you feel you could take yourself, but never have.