“William Eggleston’s way of looking at the world and his singular pictorial style reverberate across contemporary visual culture…”
An American photographer, he is widely credited with increasing recognition of colour photography as a legitimate artistic medium.
Eggleston's early photographic efforts were inspired by the work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, and by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson's book, The Decisive Moment. Eggleston later recalled that the book was: "the first serious book I found, from many awful books...I didn't understand it a bit, and then it sank in, and I realised, my God, this is a great one."
He was teaching at Harvard in the early 70s when he discovered dye-transfer printing. He was examining the price list of a photographic lab in Chicago when he read about the process.
As Eggleston later recalled: "It advertised 'from the cheapest to the ultimate print.' The ultimate print was a dye transfer. I went straight up there to look and everything I saw was commercial work like pictures of cigarette packs or perfume bottles but the color saturation and the quality of the ink were overwhelming. I couldn't wait to see what a plain Eggleston picture would look like with the same process. Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed fantastic and each one seemed better than the previous one."
The Eggleston Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to preserving and studying his work. Based in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, the Foundation houses the Eggleston Archive and serves as a resource for research about the artist, his art and the subjects of the immense body of work he began producing in the late 1950s.
Worth checking out…