{"data":{"id":"3502","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":3502,"topgoose_id":2279,"tms_id":3502,"display_name":"William Eggleston","sort_name":"Eggleston William","display_date":"1939–","begin_date":"1939","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eA pioneer in the use of color photography, William Eggleston has been capturing aspects of everyday life in his native South for nearly five decades. His education in the medium came from books on the work of photographers such as Henri Cartier- Bresson, \u003ca href=\"/artists/4831\"\u003eWalker Evans\u003c/a\u003e, and \u003ca href=\"/artists/3897\"\u003eRobert Frank\u003c/a\u003e. After some early efforts in black and white, Eggleston began working with color in the mid-1960s and came to national attention in 1976 when the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a solo exhibition of his work, the first it devoted to an artist working in color photography. His images of commonplace scenes and objects— primarily in and around Memphis, where he has lived since the 1960s, but also from his extensive worldwide travels—possess a snapshot aesthetic: the photographs are not preplanned, and their emotional tenor remains neutral. However, the highly saturated hues of the dye-transfer process employed in their printing, which he began using in the early 1970s, lend the images a perceptible drama.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe red ceiling and walls pictured in \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/9204\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eGreenwood, Mississippi,\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e for example, are startling in their chromatic intensity; the artist has said of the work that it “was like a Bach exercise for me because I knew that red was the most difficult color to work with. . . . The photograph is still powerful. It shocks you every time.” The claustrophobic effect of the color combines with the image of the single uncovered light bulb and multiple white electrical cords crisscrossing the ceiling to give the impression that the room is the setting for something untoward, and the fragment of the poster illustrating sexual positions does nothing to dispute this reading.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":false,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500030719","wikidata_id":"Q389912","created_at":"2017-08-30T17:16:44.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-30T07:01:04.131-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/3502/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/3502/exhibitions"}}}}