William eggleston brief biography of albert

Summary of William Eggleston

Since the early 1960s, William Eggleston used color photographs to describe the cultural transformations in Tennessee and the rural South. He registers these changes in scenes of everyday life, such as portraits of family and friends, as well as gasoline stations, cars, and shop interiors. Switching from black and white to color, his response to the vibrancy of postwar consumer culture and America's bright promise of a better life paralleled Pop Art's fascination with consumerism. Eggleston's images speak to new cultural phenomena as they relate to photography: from the Polaroid's instantaneous images, the way things slip in and out of view in the camera lens, and our constantly shifting attention. Eggleston captures how ephemeral things represent human presence in the world, while playing with the idea of experience and memory and our perceptions of things to make them feel personal and intimate.

Accomplishments

• The snapshot, or anecdotal, aesthetic provided Eggleston with the appropriate format for creating pictures about everyday life. Although his compositions were carefully considered, their association with family photographs, amateur photography, as well as Kodak's Brownie camera (which was useable by everyone) lent his work the proper proportions and personal attitude toward the impersonal everyday.
• Color has a multivalent meaning for Eggleston: it expressed the new and the old, the banal and the extraordinary, the man-made and the natural. His non-conformist sensibilities left him open to explore the commercial printing process of dye transfer to see what it could contribute to picturing reality in color rather than the selling of lifestyles, concepts, and ideas. His brief encounter with Warhol exposed him to forms of popular photography and advertising, contributing to his experimental attitude toward the medium.
• Eggleston's use of the anecdotal character of everyday life to describe a particular place and time by fo

Editor’s Note: The following is an interview from the mid-1990s: a time-capsule moment with one of the South’s most celebrated photographers. It’s quintessentially Old School, with all that this implies.

Maude Schuyler Clay: When did you get interested in photography?

William Eggleston: I got interested in the first year of college at Vanderbilt — the fall of 1957. I bought a Canon, a developing kit, some Nikkor tanks, and a set of chemicals. I just couldn’t believe how fantastic it was. My grandfather [Judge Joseph Albert May] had all that stuff around when I was little.

MSC: Then later, in the 1960s, you discovered the work of other photographers?

WE: Well, someone gave me the book The Decisive Moment [1952] by Henri Cartier-Bresson. His weren’t like any other photographs; for instance, they weren’t like those being published in Life magazine. Cartier-Bresson had this golden, brilliant period when he was young, kind of like Robert Frank did.

MSC: [Robert Frank came to the United States in 1947 from Switzerland. In the mid-’50s, he traveled around from coast to coast taking photographs which were later made into an iconic book, The Americans, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac: “ ... with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.”] Were you aware of somebody like Robert Frank when you started working?

WE: I found out about Frank when I went by coincidence to his great 1962 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

MSC: When did you start working in color? 

WE: About 1966.

MSC: Did you do that consciously, or did you just get a roll of color film and try it out?

WE: I had seen a bunch of Technicolor movies and I had these dreams about fantastic color schemes that I was wor

William Eggleston (born 1939) describes his selection of subjects as “democratic.” He trains his lens on banal things, such as the red ceiling in the guest room of a friend’s house. The thousands of photographs Eggleston has shot over the years form an eccentric, aggregate portrait of Memphis, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Delta. Working primarily with dye-transfer prints, a technique of printing color photographs that yields pure and intense color and now utilizing the new pigment print digital technology Eggleston records this world, not in muted shades of black and white, but in raw, sometimes garish hues. In 1976, Eggleston was the subject of the first exhibition of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition gave a new artistic legitimacy to color photography, which until then had been deemed suitable only for advertising and commercial work.

Eggleston has exhibited widely including solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Fondation Cartier, Paris; the Hasselblad Center, Göteborg, Sweden; the Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen; and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC. His work was recently the subject of a major retrospective organized by the  Whitney Museum of American Art. His work is represented in many American and international collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. ; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Santa Monica; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Eggleston’s work has been published in numerous monographs including William Eggleston’s Guide (Museum of Modern Art,1976), The Democratic Forest (Secker & Warburg1989), Ancient and Modern (Random House1992), 2 ¼ (Twin Palms 1999), Los Alamos (Scalo 2003) and 5x7 (Twin Palms 2006),&n