William Eggleston

William Eggleston (born July 27, 1939) is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium.

Quotes

• The myth makes it bigger but when you go in there, you know where you are. I've been in many places bigger than that and it ain't the same.
  • William Eggleston (1983) telling Richard Harrington of the Washington Post on December 10, 1983 how he felt about Graceland after photographing it in 1982, as part of the publication of a paperback entitled “Elvis at Graceland”, the visual images of which having been commissioned to him, on the recommendation of Andy Warhol, by the Elvis Presley Estate. On April 7, 2021, almost 4 decades after that assignment, a set made up of just 11 of those prints was auctioned at Phillips in New York, hammering at US$226,000

• You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too... I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.
  • William Eggleston, cited in: Aperture 165, Aperture Foundation, 2001. p. 12.
  • Earlier William Eggleston attributed the first saying You can take a good picture of anything to Garry Winogrand in a conversation with him. Source: HORSES & DOGS PB, 1994. p. 5

Quotes about William Eggleston

• William Eggleston, the pioneer of colour photography shocked the art world in 1976 with his exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and his accompanying book, William Eggleston's Guide. The exhibition validated colour photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Alongside his friends Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand, Eggleston is regarded as one of the most inventive and radical photographers of modern times. His reputation continued to grow with the publication of The Democratic Forest in 1989, an epic drawn from, over ten thousand prints, with, an introduction by Eudora Welty. It was described by The New York Times as the first masterpiece of colour photography. Eggleston has always lived in Mississippi and Memphis. His work is deeply rooted in the South, but he transcends the label of Southern artist. His range is international. This book, published to coincide with an exhibition originating at Barbican Art Gallery in London, is the first time work from his whole career has been gathered to form a coherent sequence. It follows a course of ancient and modern from Mississippi to Louisiana and into Elvis Presley's mansion Graceland, through the oil rigs in Tennessee and the orchards of the Transvaal, to the slopes of Mount Kenya and down the Nile, with the collection ending on the lyrical imagery of the English rose. The cumulative effect of Eggleston's startling work reinforces his reputation as a major American artist, whose significance extends beyond the world of photography.
  • Editorial of William Eggleston, Barbican Art Gallery, Ancient and Modern Random House, 1992.

• Eggleston was a man of his time, the 1960s. In the 1960s, street photography was at its zenith, and Pop Art dominated painting and sculpture. Eggleston fused elements of both street photography and Pop Art into his oeuvre. Like Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Stephen Shore, Eggleston shot from the hip, blending the new apolitical snapshot aesthetic with the older and more traditional stylings of Cartier-Bresson.
  • University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses, The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston. 2019. ‎Ann J. Abadie, p. 176.