William Eggleston

William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1939. He grew up in Mississippi. His interest in visual media began at an early age, when he reportedly enjoyed buying postcards and cutting out images from magazines. He was also interested in audio technology.

While at university, William Eggleston took art classes at Ole Miss, where he became interested in abstract expressionism. It was at this time that he began to take an interest in photography; a friend gave him a Leica camera.

Eggleston's early photographic endeavours were inspired by the American photographer Robert Frank, and by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson's book The Decisive Moment (1952). Although he began working in black and white, in 1965 and 1966 Eggleston started experimenting with colour film, which eventually became his principal means of expression in the late 1960s.

Eggleston taught at Harvard in 1973, and it was during this period that he discovered the dye-transfer printing technique. In 1974, he prepared his first portfolio, entitled 14 pictures. This portfolio was made up of images printed using the dye-transfer technique. Eggleston's work was then presented at an exhibition at MoMA in 1976, accompanied by the publication of William Eggleston's Guide. The MoMA exhibition is considered a turning point in the history of photography, marking ‘the acceptance of colour photography by the greatest institution of validation’ (in the words of Mark Holborn). It is often said that Eggleston was the first artist to hold a solo exhibition of colour photographs in the history of MoMA, but this is not true; Ernst Hass had exhibited there in 1962.

William Eggleston's Guide was followed by other books and portfolios, including Los Alamos (completed in 1974), the resounding Election Eve (1976), The Morals of Vision (1978), Flowers (1978), Wedgwood blue (1979), Seven (1979), Troubled Waters (1980), The Louisiana Project (1980), William Eggleston's Graceland (1984), The Democratic Forest (1989), Faulkner's Mississippi (1990), and Ancient and Modern (1992).

William Eggleston was somewhat forgotten in the 1990s before being rehabilitated in the early 2000s.

The documentary film By the Ways: A Journey With William Eggleston, directed by Vincent Gérard and Cédric Laty, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival in 2006.