William Eggleston

Eggleston received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, the Hasselblad Award in 1998, and Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2003.

William Eggleston studied at University of Mississippi, Vanderbilt University and The Webb School. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is photography. Employment is recorded with Harvard University. Works named in the authority record are Greenwood, Mississippi. Work by William Eggleston is recorded in the collections of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and Tate. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship and Hasselblad Award.

• Name — William Eggleston • Born — 27 July 1939 • Birthplace — Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. • Spouse — Rosa Dossett (m. 1964, died 2015) • Children — 3 • Field — Photography • Works — * William Eggleston's Guide (1976) • The Democratic Forest (1989) • The Red Ceiling • Website — www.egglestonartfoundation.org

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 boarding school, the Webb School. 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." Eggleston was unusual among his peers in eschewing the traditional Southern male pursuits of hunting and sports, in favour of artistic pursuits and observation of the world. Nevertheless, Eggleston noted that he never felt like an outsider, telling a reporter that " I never had the feeling that I didn't fit in...But probably I didn't." 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 the university by visiting painter Tom Young.

From 1973 to 1974, Eggleston taught at Harvard. During these years, whilst examining the price list of a photographic lab in Chicago, he discovered dye-transfer printing. 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." The dye-transfer process resulted in some of Eggleston's most striking and famous work, such as his 1973 photograph 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." At Harvard, Eggleston prepared his first portfolio, entitled 14 Pictures (1974). In 1976, Eggleston's work was exhibited at MoMA. 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, the tale that the Eggleston exhibition was MoMA's first exhibition of color photography is frequently repeated,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". In 1976, 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. 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." Some of his early series were not shown until the late 2000s. For example, 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. 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. Eggleston's Election Eve photographs were not editioned until 2011.

In the 1970s, Eggleston also experimented with video, producing several hours of roughly edited footage Eggleston called Stranded in Canton. Writer Richard Woodward called this footage 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 suggested 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."

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).

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!" 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." 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."

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." Musik was made entirely on a 1980s Korg synthesiser, and recorded to floppy disks. The album 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. He released two albums in total: • Musik (Secretly Canadian, 2017) – produced by Tom Lunt • 512 (Secretly Canadian, 2023) – produced by Tom Lunt

In 2012, 39 of Eggleston's larger-format prints – 40 by instead of the original format of 16 by – sold for $5.9 million in an auction at Christie's to benefit the Eggleston Artistic Trust, an organisation 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. 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. The court dismissed the lawsuit.

Eggleston's photographs have been used as the cover of several musical albums including: • Year — Image — Artist — Album • 1974 — The Red Ceiling (1973) — Big Star — Radio City • 1979 — (Dolls on a Cadillac hood) — Alex Chilton — Like Flies on Sherbert • 1994 — (Neon Confederate flag and a palm tree) — Primal Scream — Give Out But Don't Give Up • Terry Manning — Christopher Idylls (CD release) • 2001 — Memphis (1968) — Jimmy Eat World — Bleed American • 2004 — Chuck Prophet — Age of Miracles • 2005 — Silver Jews — Tanglewood Numbers • 2006 — Primal Scream — "Country Girl" (Single) • 2007 — Joanna Newsom — Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band • 2010 — Spoon — Transference • 2021 — The Black Keys — Delta Kream • 2026 — Peaches! • 2026 — Kurt Vile — Philadelphia's Been Good to Me One of Eggleston's photographs is also the cover for the paperback edition of Ali Smith's novel The Accidental.

• William Eggleston in the Real World (2005), by Michael Almereyda. • By the Ways: A Journey with William Eggleston (2007), directed by Vincent Gérard and Cédric Laty – selected for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival in 2006. • The Colourful Mr. Eggleston (2009), directed by Jack Cocker and Reiner Holzemer – an episode of the Imagine (TV series) for BBC One. • The Source (2012), by Doug Aitken. • Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me (2013), directed by Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori.

• Great Balls of Fire (1989), directed by Jim McBride – Eggleston plays Jerry Lee Lewis's father, Elmo Lewis. • 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)

Selected exhibition history • Year — Title — Institution — Location — Ref • 1976 — MoMA — New York • 1999–2000 — William Eggleston and the Color Tradition, — J. Paul Getty Museum — Los Angeles • 2001–2002 — William Eggleston — Fondation Cartier — Paris • Hayward Gallery — London • 2002 — documenta 11 — Kassel, Germany • 2002–2005 — William Eggleston: Los Alamos — Museum Ludwig — Cologne, Germany • Serralves Foundation — Portugal • Norwegian Museum of Contemporary Art — Oslo, Norway • Louisiana Museum of Modern Art — Humlebaek, Denmark • Albertina — Vienna, Austria • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — San Francisco, California • Dallas Museum of Art — Dallas, Texas • 2008 — William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video 1961–2008 — Whitney Museum of American Art — New York • 2012 — New Dyes — Rose Gallery — Santa Monica, California • 2016 — William Eggleston: Selections from the Wilson Centre for Photography — Portland Art Museum — Portland • William Eggleston Portraits — National Portrait Gallery — London • 2017 — William Eggleston: Los Alamos — Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam — Amsterdam • 2018 — Metropolitan Museum of Art • 2023 — William Eggleston: Mystery of the Ordinary — C/O Berlin — Berlin, Germany • 2024/2025 — William Eggleston The Last Dyes — David Zwirner Gallery — Los Angeles

• Eggleston, William (1989). The Democratic Forest. Introduction by Eudora Welty. New York: Doubleday.. • Eggleston, William & Morris, William (1990). Faulkner's Mississippi. Birmingham: Oxmoor House.. • Eggleston, William (1992). Ancient and Modern. Introduction by Mark Holborn. New York: Random House.. • 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