AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Color photographs of everyday life in the American South; William Eggleston’s Guide (1976)
- Works in
- Color, often printed with the dye-transfer process
- Camera
- 35mm rangefinder; later also a square-format camera
- Also
- Video and music
- Start with
- William Eggleston’s Guide (The Museum of Modern Art, 2002)
- Links
William Eggleston (born 1939) is an American photographer from Memphis, Tennessee. His 1976 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York helped make color photography accepted as art. He finds his pictures in ordinary life in the American South: cars, diners, shops, streets and the people around him.
The story
Around 1970, a child’s tricycle stood on a quiet street in Memphis. William Eggleston photographed it from very low, close to the ground. From down there, the small tricycle rose above the houses like a monument.
Photography had come to him almost by chance. In the fall of 1957 he started at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. A friend from boarding school “insisted that I buy a camera and marched me downtown.” He came back with a Canon rangefinder. His first hero was Henri Cartier-Bresson. “I couldn’t imagine doing anything more than making a perfect fake Cartier-Bresson,” he said of those years. Like his hero, he worked in black and white.
But Memphis was changing. New shopping centers and supermarkets appeared, and he photographed them. In the mid-1960s he began to work in color. In 1967 he took a suitcase of color slides and prints to New York. Friends like Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander told him to show them to John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art. Szarkowski was “incredibly supportive about me working in color.”
On 25 May 1976 the museum opened a show of 75 of his prints. It was its first solo show of color photographs. The book that came with it, William Eggleston’s Guide, held 48 pictures from Memphis and the Mississippi towns around it. One shows two men in Sumner, the small town where he grew up.
Many critics did not like the show. Hilton Kramer of The New York Times called the pictures “perfectly banal.” Eggleston was calm about it. “Didn’t bother me a bit. I laughed at ’em,” he said many years later. Today that show is seen as a turning point for color photography.
And on the cover of the Guide is the tricycle, the same everyday thing from that quiet street. He never went looking for grander subjects. “I have this discipline of treating everything equally,” he explained. “I used to say ‘democratically.’”
The work
- 1939Born on 27 July in Memphis, Tennessee; grows up in Sumner, Mississippi
- 1957Buys his first camera, a Canon rangefinder, at Vanderbilt University
- 1967Takes his color slides and prints to New York
- 1974Guggenheim Fellowship; teaches at Harvard
- 1976Solo show at MoMA; William Eggleston’s Guide is published
- 1989Publishes The Democratic Forest
- 1998Wins the Hasselblad Award
- 2008Retrospective Democratic Camera at the Whitney Museum
- 2024Shows The Last Dyes at David Zwirner, Los Angeles
Lessons
Change your height. Photographed from very low, a child’s tricycle became a monument.
Treat everything equally. A supermarket, a parked car or a table in a diner can be as worthy as a grand view.
One frame, then move on. He takes a single frame of each subject. Then he is already thinking about the next picture.
Try this: choose one ordinary object near your home, like a bike, a chair or a mailbox. Get down to its height and take just one frame. Then walk on and do the same with the next thing you notice.
Gear
Canon rangefinder: his first camera, bought in Nashville in 1957, the year he started at Vanderbilt University.
35mm color slide film: the pictures in William Eggleston’s Guide were made on 35mm slides, Kodachrome among them.
Square-format camera: around 1977 he used a 2¼-inch square-format camera in California and the American South. These pictures became the book 2¼.
Dye-transfer printing: a costly process first used in advertising. It gives his prints their deep, strong color.
He often does not look through the camera at all. In his words, that is “very close to being blind.”
Books
William Eggleston’s Guide (The Museum of Modern Art, 1976; facsimile edition 2002). The book that came with his 1976 show at MoMA, and the museum’s first book of color photography. John Szarkowski chose 48 pictures from about 375 made in and around Memphis between 1969 and 1971, and wrote the essay. The 2002 facsimile uses new color separations made from the original 35mm slides and keeps the textured cover with the tricycle and gold lettering. It is the best place to start, for anyone who wants to see how ordinary places can become strong pictures.
The Democratic Forest (Steidl, 2015). Ten volumes and 1,328 pages with more than 1,000 photographs, chosen from about 12,000 he made in the 1980s. The set grows out of a single book from 1989. The first volume shows Louisiana. The others follow him from Memphis and Tennessee to Dallas, Pittsburgh, Miami, Boston, Kentucky and Berlin, and the last returns to small Southern towns. It has a new introduction by Mark Holborn and the original essay by Eudora Welty. A large set for readers who want to go deep into one long body of work.
Chromes (Steidl, 2011). Three volumes in a slipcase, 144 pages each, made with Thomas Weski. The pictures come from more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes kept in ten binders, the same archive John Szarkowski used to choose the Guide. Almost none of these pictures had been published before. It shows his early color work in Memphis and how his style grew. Good for readers who already know the Guide and want to see what else was there.
Los Alamos Revisited (Steidl, 2012). A single clothbound volume of 578 pages in a slipcase. It holds the Los Alamos series, made between 1965 and 1974, partly on road trips across the United States with Walter Hopps, who drove while Eggleston photographed. It updates and completes the smaller book Los Alamos (Scalo, 2003), and adds negatives found after Hopps died in 2005. The fullest view of his early color years on the road.
In his words
“I am at war with the obvious.”
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