William Eggleston

William Eggleston – An introverted child with an interest in art

William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee on 27 July 1939. He came from a well-heeled background; his father an engineer and his mother the daughter of a lawyer, the family owned a cotton plantation in Mayfair where Eggelston spent his childhood. He was considered an introverted child who played the piano, drew, or occupied himself with electronic tinkering rather than scampering around with other children. He was interested in visual media from early on, bought postcards and cut pictures out of magazines. As a student at the privately run Web School, he stood out because of his perceived feminine inclination towards painting and music, whilst his male classmates preferred to devote their time to hunting and sports. Despite this, the artist said in retrospect that he never felt like an outsider, although he probably was one. He attended Vanderbilt University for a year and the University of Mississippi for five years, but left without graduating. 

The bold step to colour photography

William Eggleston began intensively working with photography during his time at university. A friend and colleague gave him a Leica and, having first experimented with the medium at the age of ten, Eggelston recognised that his career lay in photography. He was particularly excited by the work of the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank and the book The Decisive Moment by the French star photography Henri Cartier-Bresson. Like his role models, Eggleston photographed in black and white at the beginning of his career in the 1950s, but once his friend William Christenberry introduced him to colour photography, he ventured to the make the change in the 1960s - quite a risky decision at the time as that medium was scorned as a commercial tool and not recognised as a worthy for art. William Eggleston perhaps owed his courage to take this step to the fact that he developed as a photographer largely in isolation and alone. 

Paradigm shift in art photography

William Eggleston demonstrated courage and independence not only in his decision to use colour photography, but also in his choice of motif. Like the painter Edgar Hopper, he sought out simple motifs unworthy of artistic attention for his photographic work. He chose dye transfer for his prints which until then had only be used in commercial photography. His picture Greenwood, Mississippi (1973), shows only a red ceiling, and with its idiosyncratic worm’s-eye view and exaggerated colouring, became a stylistic model for many later photographers, heralding a turning point in the history of photography. Photographers and filmmakers such as Juergen Teller, David Lynch, Sofia Coppola and Andreas Gursky all refer to William Eggleston in their work. Eggleston has received prizes and awards for his photographic work, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, the Internationalen-Preis der Hasselblad-Stiftung in 1998, and the Sony World Photography Award in 2013. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2009.