William Eggleston

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William Eggleston, (born July 27, 1939)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition of color photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Eggleston's books include William Eggleston's Guide (1976) and The Democratic Forest (1989).

Eggleston received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974,<ref name="gf">"William J. Eggleston Template:Webarchive". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. gf.org. Retrieved 31 March 2018.</ref> the Hasselblad Award in 1998,<ref name="hasselbladfoundation">Template:Cite web</ref> and Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2003.<ref name="rps">Template:Cite web</ref>

Early life and education

Template:BLP sources section William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Sumner, Mississippi. His father was an engineer and his mother was the daughter of a prominent local judge. 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.

At the age of 15, Eggleston was sent to the Webb School, a boarding establishment. Eggleston later recalled few fond memories of the school, telling a reporter, "It had a kind of Spartan routine to 'build character'. I never knew what that was supposed to mean. It was so callous and dumb. It was the kind of place where it was considered effeminate to like music and painting."Template:Citation needed Eggleston was unusual among his peers in eschewing the traditional Southern male pursuits of hunting and sports, in favor of artistic pursuits and observation of the world. Nevertheless, Eggleston noted that he never felt like an outsider. "I never had the feeling that I didn't fit in," he told a reporter, "But probably I didn't."<ref name="BelcoveW">Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Eggleston attended Vanderbilt University for a year, Delta State College for a semester, and the University of Mississippi for about five years, but did not complete any degree. Nonetheless, his interest in photography took root when a friend at Vanderbilt gave Eggleston a Leica camera. He was introduced to abstract expressionism at Ole Miss by visiting painter Tom Young.

Artistic development

Template:BLP sources section 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 realized, my God, this is a great one."<ref name="BelcoveW" /> First photographing in black-and-white, Eggleston began experimenting with color in 1965 and 1966 after being introduced to the format by William Christenberry. Color transparency film became his dominant medium in the later 1960s. Eggleston's development as a photographer seems to have taken place in relative isolation from other artists. In an interview, John Szarkowski describes his first encounter with the young Eggleston in 1969 as being "absolutely out of the blue".Template:Citation needed After reviewing Eggleston's work (which he recalled as a suitcase full of "drugstore" color prints) Szarkowski prevailed upon the Photography Committee of MoMA to buy one of Eggleston's photographs.

In 1970, Eggleston's friend William Christenberry introduced him to Walter Hopps (director of Washington D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery). Hopps later reported being "stunned" by Eggleston's work: "I had never seen anything like it."Template:Citation needed

Eggleston taught at Harvard in 1973 and 1974, and it was during these years that 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."<ref name="Holborn1992">Template:Cite book</ref> The dye-transfer process resulted in some of Eggleston's most striking and famous work, such as his 1973 photograph entitled The Red Ceiling, of which Eggleston said, "The Red Ceiling is so powerful, that in fact, I've never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction. When you look at the dye it is like red blood that's wet on the wall... A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge."Template:Sfn

At Harvard, Eggleston prepared his first portfolio, entitled 14 Pictures (1974). Eggleston's work was exhibited at MoMA in 1976. Although this was over three decades after MoMa had mounted a solo exhibition of color photographs by Eliot Porter, and a decade after MoMA had exhibited color photographs by Ernst Haas,<ref name="moma1962pr">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="poynor">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="recreationopinarte">"reCREATION: The first color photography exhibition at MoMA, 1962 Template:Webarchive", Opinarte, 2005</ref> the tale that the Eggleston exhibition was MoMA's first exhibition of color photography is frequently repeated,<ref group="n">Two examples: "[Eggleston] managed to convince [MoMA] to grant him their very first one-man exhibition of color photography" (Jim Lewis, "Kodachrome Moment: How William Eggleston's revolutionary exhibition changed everything", Slate, February 10, 2003); "a controversial but revolutionary exhibition in 1976—MoMA's first solo show to feature color photographs—and a classic accompanying book, William Eggleston's Guide" ("William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008", Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2009).</ref> and the 1976 show is regarded as a watershed moment in the history of photography, by marking "the acceptance of colour photography by the highest validating institution".Template:Sfn

Around the time of his 1976 MoMA exhibition, Eggleston was introduced to Viva, the Andy Warhol "superstar", with whom he began a long relationship. During this period Eggleston became familiar with Andy Warhol's circle, a connection that may have helped foster Eggleston's idea of the "democratic camera", Mark Holborn suggests.Template:Sfn Also in the 1970s, Eggleston experimented with video, producing several hours of roughly edited footage Eggleston calls Stranded in Canton. Writer Richard Woodward, who has viewed the footage, likens it to a "demented home movie", mixing tender shots of his children at home with shots of drunken parties, public urination, and a man biting off a chicken's head before a cheering crowd in New Orleans. Woodward suggests that the film is reflective of Eggleston's "fearless naturalism—a belief that by looking patiently at what others ignore or look away from, interesting things can be seen."Template:Citation needed

Eggleston's published books and portfolios include Los Alamos (completed in 1974, but published much later), William Eggleston's Guide (the catalog of the 1976 MoMa exhibit), the massive Election Eve (1977; a portfolio of photographs taken around Plains, Georgia, the rural seat of Jimmy Carter before the 1976 presidential election), The Morals of Vision (1978), Flowers (1978), Wedgwood Blue (1979), Seven (1979), Troubled Waters (1980), The Louisiana Project (1980), William Eggleston's Graceland (1984; a series of commissioned photographs of Elvis Presley's Graceland, depicting the singer's home as an airless, windowless tomb in custom-made bad taste),<ref name="nytimes.com">Template:Cite news</ref> The Democratic Forest (1989), Faulkner's Mississippi (1990), and Ancient and Modern (1992).

Some of his early series were not shown until the late 2000s. The Nightclub Portraits (1973), a series of large black-and-white portraits in bars and clubs around Memphis was, for the most part, not shown until 2005.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Lost and Found, part of Eggleston's Los Alamos series, is a body of photographs that have remained unseen for decades because until 2008 no one knew that they belonged to Walter Hopps; the works from this series chronicle road trips the artist took with Hopps, leaving from Memphis and traveling as far as the West Coast.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Eggleston's Election Eve photographs were not editioned until 2011.<ref>William Eggleston: Election Eve, November 9 – December 23, 2011 Gagosian Gallery, Paris</ref>

Eggleston also worked with filmmakers, photographing the set of John Huston's film Annie (1982) and documenting the making of David Byrne's film True Stories (1986).

In 2017, an album of Eggleston's music was released, Musik. It comprises 13 "experimental electronic soundscapes", "often dramatic improvisations on compositions by Bach (his hero) and Handel as well as his singular takes on a Gilbert and Sullivan tune and the jazz standard On the Street Where You Live."<ref name="ohagan-guardian-2017">Template:Cite news</ref> Musik was made entirely on a 1980s Korg synthesiser, and recorded to floppy disks. The 2017 compilation Musik was produced by Tom Lunt, and released on Secretly Canadian. In 2018, Áine O'Dwyer performed the music on a pipe organ at the Big Ears music festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Eggleston's aesthetic

Template:BLP sources section Eggleston's mature work is characterized by its ordinary subject matter. As Eudora Welty noted in her introduction to The Democratic Forest, an Eggleston photograph might include "old tires, Dr. Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, parking meters, and palm trees crowding the same curb."

Eudora Welty suggests that Eggleston sees the complexity and beauty of the mundane world: "The extraordinary, compelling, honest, beautiful and unsparing photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the everyday world: they succeed in showing us the grain of the present, like the cross-section of a tree... They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!"<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Mark Holborn, in his introduction to Ancient and Modern, writes about the dark undercurrent of these mundane scenes as viewed through Eggleston's lens: "[Eggleston's] subjects are, on the surface, the ordinary inhabitants and environs of suburban Memphis and Mississippi—friends, family, barbecues, back yards, a tricycle and the clutter of the mundane. The normality of these subjects is deceptive, for behind the images there is a sense of lurking danger."Template:Sfn American artist Edward Ruscha said of Eggleston's work, "When you see a picture he's taken, you're stepping into some kind of jagged world that seems like Eggleston World."<ref name="BelcoveW" />

According to Philip Gefter from Art & Auction, "It is worth noting that Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, pioneers of color photography in the early 1970s, borrowed, consciously or not, from the photorealists. Their photographic interpretation of the American vernacular—gas stations, diners, parking lots—is foretold in photorealist paintings that preceded their pictures."<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Art market

In 2012, three dozen of Eggleston's larger-format prints – Template:Convert instead of the original format of Template:Convert – sold for $5.9 million in an auction at Christie's to benefit the Eggleston Artistic Trust, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the artist's work. The top lot, Untitled 1970, set a world auction record for a single print by the photographer at $578,000.<ref name="theartnewspaper.com">Template:Cite web</ref>

New York art collector Jonathan Sobel subsequently filed a lawsuit in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against Eggleston, alleging that the artist's decision to print and sell oversized versions of some of his famous images in an auction has diluted the rarity—and therefore the resale value—of the originals.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> The court later dismissed the lawsuit.<ref name="theartnewspaper.com" />

Photographs in notable publications

Template:BLP unreferenced section The earliest commercial use of Eggleston's art was on album covers for the Memphis group Big Star, with whom Eggleston recorded for the album Third/Sister Lovers and who used his photograph The Red Ceiling on their album Radio City. Eggleston's photograph of dolls on a Cadillac hood featured on the cover of the Alex Chilton album Like Flies on Sherbert. The Primal Scream album Give Out But Don't Give Up features a cropped photograph of a neon Confederate flag and a palm tree by Eggleston. His photographs were used for the front and back covers of the CD release of long-time friend and fellow photographer Terry Manning's album Christopher Idylls (1994). His photograph "Memphis (1968)" was used as the cover of Jimmy Eat World's album Bleed American (2001).

In 2006, an Eggleston image was used as both the cover to Primal Scream's single "Country Girl" and the paperback edition of Ali Smith's novel The Accidental. The same picture had already been used on the cover of Chuck Prophet's Age of Miracles album in 2004.

Eggleston's photos also appear on Tanglewood Numbers by the Silver Jews, Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band by Joanna Newsom, Transference by Spoon and Delta Kream by the Black Keys.

Publications

Films

Documentary appearances

Movie and series appearances

  • Great Balls of Fire (1989), directed by Jim McBride – Eggleston plays Jerry Lee Lewis's father, Elmo Lewis.<ref name="Prodger" />
  • Restless, x-ray technician (2011), as himself.
  • Today (TV Series) (episode dated 31 May 2011), as himself.
  • Sunday Morning (A Father and Daughter's Artistic Collaboration, 2016)

Music

Exhibitions

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Awards

  • 1974: Guggenheim Fellowship<ref name="gf"/>
  • 1975: Photographer's Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts<ref name="ContempPhotographers">"William Eggleston." Contemporary Photographers. Detroit: Gale, 1996. Retrieved via Biography In Context database, 1 April 2018.</ref>
  • 1978: Survey Grant, National Endowment for the Arts, for a survey of Mississippi cotton farms using photography and color video<ref name="ContempPhotographers" /><ref>"Eggleston, William", in Template:Cite book</ref>
  • 1989: "54 Master Photographers of 1960-1979" Award, Photographic Society of Japan<ref name="Prodger">Prodger, Phillip (2016).

William Eggleston Portraits. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same title at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 21 July to 23 October 2016. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Template:ISBN. p. 175 ("Chronology").</ref>

Collections

Eggleston's work is held in the following public collections:

Notes

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References

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General references

  • Eggleston, William (1989). The Democratic Forest. Introduction by Eudora Welty. New York: Doubleday. Template:ISBN.
  • Eggleston, William & Morris, William (1990). Faulkner's Mississippi. Birmingham: Oxmoor House. Template:ISBN.
  • Eggleston, William (1992). Ancient and Modern. Introduction by Mark Holborn. New York: Random House. Template:ISBN.
  • Lindgren, Carl Edwin. (1993 Summer). "Ancient and modern". Review of Ancient and Modern by William Eggleston. Number, Volume 19:20–21.
  • Lindgren, Carl Edwin. (1993). "Enigmatic presence". Review of Ancient and Modern by William Eggleston. RSA Journal (Journal of the Roy. Soc. of Arts), Volume 141 Number 5439, 404.
  • Woodward, Richard B. (October 1991). "Memphis Beau". Vanity Fair.
  • Eggleston Trust bio

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