William Eggleston Overview

William Eggleston is an American photographer widely credited with introducing color photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Eggleston's gift is largely in capturing the everyday hero, the work-a-day images of rural America. As the writer Willie Morris... [more]

William Eggleston is an American photographer widely credited with introducing color photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Eggleston's gift is largely in capturing the everyday hero, the work-a-day images of rural America. As the writer Willie Morris wrote, Eggleston's "depiction of the rural Southern countryside speaks eloquently of the fictional world of Faulkner and, not coincidentally, the shared experience of almost every Southerner. Often lurid, always lyrical, his stark realism resonates with the language and tone of Faulkner's greatest mythic cosmos of Yoknapatawpha County .... The work of William Eggleston would have pleased Bill Faulkner ... immensely." Famous for his discovery of dye-transfer printing, Eggleston's images blend a startling naturalism with an off-kilter eye for capturing the outskirts of American vernacular - the tender, the impatient, the demented, the destitute. Polaroid-esq., his subjects are hauntingly familiar and yet his palette, with its hyper-real saturation of hue and color, belongs to the glossy ads of advertising's future. The dye-transfer process resulted in some of Eggleston's most striking and famous work, such as his 1973 photograph entitled The Red Ceiling. [show less]