William Eggleston
1939–
A 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, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. 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.
The red ceiling and walls pictured in Greenwood, Mississippi, 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.
Introduction
William Eggleston, (born July 27, 1939) is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition of color photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Eggleston's books include William Eggleston's Guide (1976) and The Democratic Forest (1989).
Eggleston received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, the Hasselblad Award in 1998, and Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2003.
Wikidata identifier
Q389912
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 24, 2025.
Introduction
Education: Webb School, Bell Buckle, Tennesse; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, ca. 1962; Delta State State College, Cleveland, Mississippi; and University of Mississippi, Oxford. Freelance photographer, Memphis, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., since 1962 or 1963. Lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies, Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1974. Researcher in Color Video, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 1978-1979. Recipient: Guggenheim Fellowship, 1974; National Endowment for the Arts Photographer's Fellowship, 1975; and Arts Survey Grant, 1978.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, lecturer, photographer, researcher
ULAN identifier
500030719
Names
William Eggleston
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 24, 2025.
