Background
William Eggleston was born on July 27, 1939, in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Sumner, Mississippi. His father was an engineer and his mother was the daughter of a prominent local judge.
Webb School
Delta State College
University of Mississippi
Vanderbilt University
William Eggleston was born on July 27, 1939, in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Sumner, Mississippi. His father was an engineer and his mother was the daughter of a prominent local judge.
At the age of 15, Eggleston was sent to the Webb School, a boarding establishment. William attended Vanderbilt University, Delta State College, and the University of Mississippi, but never graduated.
Eggleston was extremely intelligent. When he was 18 he received his first camera, a Canon Rangefinder, and taught himself how to use it. Eggleston's first photographs were shot in black and white because at the time, the film was cheap and readily available. He had a friend who worked at a drugstore photo lab and he would hang around the lab watching the family snapshots being produced. This inspired him to take his own snapshots of the world around him, which during the 1940s and 50s was rapidly changing. Like the rest of the country, the American South was transforming. Cars, shopping malls, and suburbs began popping up everywhere and Eggleston, fascinated by this cultural shift, began to capture it with his camera. Decades later, this innate knowledge of Southern culture and society would provide the material for his most successful work.
Coming from an affluent family meant Eggleston would never have to work for a living and could instead devote his time to his passion. He studied art for about six years at various colleges but never actually graduated. While at University, he was introduced to photojournalism and very much inspired by Robert Frank's photo book "The Americans", published in 1959 in the United States. In 1959, Eggleston saw Evans's major exhibition "American Photographs", and read Henri Cartier-Bresson's seminal book "The Decisive Moment." It's Cartier-Bresson's pioneering candid, street photography that Eggleston credits as being a continual inspiration in his work.
In the late 1960s, Eggleston began experimenting with color photography, a medium that was so new and unorthodox, it was considered to be too lowbrow for fine art photography, which was at the time the domain of the black and white image. But Eggleston, as he put it, "wanted to see things in color because the world is in color." And in 1972, by chance, he discovered a commercial way of printing photos, which enhanced his subject matter and finally created the full impact of color he was after. This new printing technique was called dye-transfer. It was very expensive, and as a result only used in advertising and fashion. But it created such a rich, saturated color that Eggleston couldn't fathom using any other type of printing. Today this laborious printing process is considered outdated, but he continues to use it.
Eggleston was awarded The Guggenheim and The National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in the mid-70s, but his success and color photography's value as an art form were largely not recognized at the time. In 1976, with the help of the influential curator John Szarkowski, Eggleston had his first exhibition dedicated to his color photographs of the rural South at the Museum of Modern Art. The show, William Eggleston's Guide was first met with incomprehension and disgust, and was widely panned by art critics. The New York Times called it "the worst show of the year." Another critic said it was "perfectly boring and perfectly banal." The bad reviews brought Eggleston notoriety, but it would take decades for critics to appreciate his work, and color photography as a whole.
Eggleston has lived a very unconventional and colorful life. When he was younger, there was plenty of drugs, booze, guns, and women. These themes made it into his work. In the early 1970s, his friend, Andy Warhol introduced him to Viva, a woman working at Warhol's Factory who became Eggleston's mistress. Warhol also introduced Eggleston to Pop art and the emerging film scene, both of which he would take an interest in. He briefly experimented with Polaroids, automatic photo-booth portraits, and video art, but became particularly inspired by Pop art's appropriation of advertising; commercial images with their saturated colors.
The art world finally came around to Eggleston's work in the eighties and nineties, bringing him some renown, especially within the film industry. Directors, like John Houston and Gus van Sant, invited him to take photographs on their movie sets. Also during this time, Eggleston expanded on his sensibility of place, as he traveled on commission to Kenya in the 1980s, and other cities in the world, including Beijing.
Born a gentleman and stubbornly set in his ways, Eggleston still uses a Leica camera with the custom-mounted f0.95 Canon lens, and detests all things digital. He's a prolific artist, who by his own account, has taken over 1.5 million photographs. Now almost in his eighties, he still lives and works in Memphis, creating pictures out of life's ordinary and mundane. Details about his personal life surface in the information about who he photographed and the comments journalists make in their reviews - he has a group of rotating girlfriends (usually educated southern women in their 40s) who attend to his current needs.
Downtown Morton, Mississippi
Jackson, Mississippi
Morton, Mississippi
Near Olive Branch, Mississippi
Jackson, Mississippi
Near Minter City and Glendora, Mississippi
Untitled
The Red Ceiling (Greenwood, Mississippi)
Crenshaw, Mississippi
Memphis
Huntsville, Alabama
Memphis
Near Jackson, Mississippi
Black Bayou Plantation, near Glendora, Mississippi
Untitled
Even from a young age, Eggleston was a nonconformist. His mother said "he was a brilliant but strange boy" who amused himself by building electronic gadgets, bugging and recording family conversations, and teaching himself how to play the piano. Eggleston has said he could hear music once and then immediately know how to play it. This nonconformist way of viewing things would continue throughout his life, eventually becoming the catalyst for his groundbreaking photographs.
Eggleston has always had a different way of seeing the world. His daughter Andrea once caught him staring for hours at a china set. It was not an expensive set and there was nothing exceptional about it, but something about this ordinary, everyday object interested him. It is this different way of seeing things that allows him to take a photo of something seemingly boring and make it interesting, setting him apart from previous photographers and his contemporaries.
As a boy, Eggleston was introverted; he enjoyed playing the piano, drawing, and working with electronics. From an early age, he was also drawn to visual media, and reportedly enjoyed buying postcards and cutting out pictures from magazines.
Quotes from others about the person
Walter Hopps, director of Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery reported being "stunned" by Eggleston's work: "I had never seen anything like it."
William Eggleston survived his wife Rosa, who died in 2015. His has two daughters, Andra and Electra, and two sons: William Eggleston III, who was involved in editing his work for the multi-volume book "The Democratic Forest," and Winston who runs the Eggleston Artistic Trust.