William Eggleston (born 1939) is an American photographer from Memphis, Tennessee, who began making pictures in the late 1950s and turned to color in the middle of the 1960s. His subjects were the ordinary things of the American South: ceilings, kitchens, motel beds, road signs, parking meters and the people near them. He is known for his 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which marked the acceptance of color photography as art.
Eggleston was born in Memphis and raised in Sumner, Mississippi. He attended Vanderbilt University, Delta State College and the University of Mississippi without completing a degree. A friend at Vanderbilt gave him a Leica camera. Two photographers gave him his direction: Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose book The Decisive Moment he studied. The painter Tom Young introduced him to abstract expressionism, and in 1965 and 1966 the artist William Christenberry introduced him to color photography. He was not the first to show color at the Museum of Modern Art. Eliot Porter had a solo color exhibition there in the 1940s and Ernst Haas showed color there in 1962. What Eggleston changed was the subject matter that color was allowed to describe.
From black and white to color slides in Memphis
His early work was in black and white. After Christenberry’s introduction he began working in color, and by the late 1960s color transparency film was his main material. The comparison of film stocks on this site explains how slide film differs from negative film.
In 1969 John Szarkowski, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, met Eggleston without warning and looked at his color prints, which Szarkowski later remembered as being of drugstore quality. He persuaded the museum’s photography committee to buy one. In 1970 Christenberry introduced Eggleston to Walter Hopps, the director of the Corcoran Gallery, who said he had never seen anything like the work.
Eggleston taught at Harvard University in 1973 and 1974, and prepared his first portfolio, 14 Pictures, there in 1974. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1975.
Dye transfer and the Museum of Modern Art, 1976
While he was teaching at Harvard, Eggleston found dye transfer printing listed on the price sheet of a Chicago photographic laboratory. Dye transfer was a commercial process, used for advertising prints. Three gelatin relief matrices are made from color separation negatives. Each one takes up cyan, magenta or yellow dye, and the three are rolled onto prepared paper one after another to build the picture. The dyes are spectrally pure and resist fading, and the process gives a wide range of color and tone. Eggleston recalled being overwhelmed by the color saturation. Eastman Kodak stopped making the materials for the process in 1994.
In 1976 the Museum of Modern Art gave him a solo exhibition, curated by Szarkowski, with the book William Eggleston’s Guide as its catalogue. It was one of the first presentations of color photography at the museum, and scholars treat it as the moment the most influential institution in the field accepted color.
How does color become the subject of a picture and not just a property of it? Color in photography covers using color deliberately.
Road trips, Graceland and The Democratic Forest
The bodies of work that followed were large and often slow to appear. Los Alamos came from road trips made with Walter Hopps, and part of it stayed unseen for decades. Election Eve was photographed around Plains, Georgia, before the presidential election of 1976. In 1973 he made a set of large black and white portraits in Memphis bars and clubs, the Nightclub Portraits, most of which were not shown until 2005. In the 1970s he also shot experimental video, later known as Stranded in Canton.
In 1984 he photographed Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley, on commission. The Democratic Forest was published in 1989 with an introduction by the writer Eudora Welty. He also photographed on film sets, including John Huston’s Annie in 1982 and David Byrne’s True Stories in 1986.
He received the Hasselblad Award in 1998 and a lifetime achievement award from the International Center of Photography in 2004. A retrospective, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961 to 2008, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2008, and the National Portrait Gallery in London showed his portraits in 2016. The Eggleston Art Foundation, a nonprofit that holds his archive, was established in Memphis in 2019.
How an Eggleston picture works
The Eggleston Art Foundation describes his approach as a democratic way of looking around. The gallery that represents him describes the result as vernacular subject matter joined to a sophisticated understanding of color, form and composition. Those two statements contain most of what can be learned from him.
- Nothing is too ordinary to photograph. In her introduction to The Democratic Forest, Eudora Welty listed what the pictures contain: old tires, soft drink machines, discarded air conditioners, empty bottles, torn posters, power poles and wires, street barricades, road signs, parking meters. The lesson is that the subject does not need to be important. The seeing does.
- Color does structural work. A strong red, or a patch of one color against another, can organize the whole frame. The site’s guide to color theory for photographers explains why some combinations pull the eye and others settle it.
- The frame is composed, even when the subject looks casual. The subjects are found, but form and composition are deliberate. He had studied The Decisive Moment before he ever worked in color, and the discipline of the frame stayed with him.
- Calm surface, uneasy feeling. Writing about Ancient and Modern, Mark Holborn described the normality of the mundane scenes as deceptive, with a sense of lurking danger behind them. The pictures do not explain themselves and do not settle on a fixed meaning.
- The print is part of the picture. He chose dye transfer for its saturation and depth of tone. A print can be made to carry more color than a page or a screen, which is why getting good color in a print is its own skill.
- Bodies of work, not single hits. Los Alamos, Election Eve and The Democratic Forest are large groups of pictures in which no single frame is asked to stand for the whole.
Wondering how a group of unrelated looking pictures becomes one body of work? Photo sequencing explains how to edit and order a set.
Photographs and books to look for
- Greenwood, Mississippi, known as The Red Ceiling (1973). A dye transfer print showing an interior with a deep red ceiling, made at a house in Greenwood, Mississippi. It has been called his most famous photograph and is often said to carry an indefinable sense of menace. Eggleston said he had never seen it reproduced on the page to his satisfaction. It was used on the cover of Big Star’s album Radio City in 1974.
- William Eggleston’s Guide (1976). The book that accompanied the Museum of Modern Art exhibition. It is the place to see the work that the 1976 argument about color was actually about.
- Memphis (1968). A picture titled for his home city, from the years when he was moving into color. It was used in 2001 on the cover of the Jimmy Eat World album Bleed American.
- Los Alamos. Pictures from road trips with Walter Hopps, published as a book in 2003. Look at how many different kinds of subject the same eye accepts.
- Election Eve. Made around Plains, Georgia, before the 1976 election. Its interest is in what a photographer chooses to look at when a news event is expected.
- The Democratic Forest (1989). The book with Welty’s introduction, and the fullest statement of the idea that everything in front of the camera deserves equal attention.
Does working on film change how color looks? Film photography covers shooting on film from loading to scanning.
Try this: fifteen minutes of democratic looking
Stand outside your front door, or in one room, with a phone or a camera. Set a timer for 15 minutes.
- Do not walk more than fifty steps from where you start.
- Photograph only things you would normally ignore: a bin, a meter, a cable, a ceiling, the inside of a cupboard. No people posing, no views, no pets.
- Allow yourself one exposure for each subject. Compose it properly before you press the button, then move on.
- In every frame, find the strongest color first and decide where it sits. Build the rest of the frame around it.
- Stop at twelve pictures. Lay them out side by side and remove the three that depend on the subject being interesting. Keep the ones that work because of color and framing.
The exercise practises the one habit the work rests on: giving an unimportant subject the same care as an important one.
Looking for more subjects that hide in plain sight? How to see like a photographer offers ways to train the eye.
Questions people ask about William Eggleston
Why is William Eggleston important?
His 1976 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by John Szarkowski, is treated as the point at which color photography was accepted by the leading museum in the field. He also showed that everyday Southern scenes could carry serious pictures.
Was Eggleston’s 1976 show the first color photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art?
No, although it is often described that way. Eliot Porter had a solo color exhibition there in the 1940s, and Ernst Haas showed color photographs there in 1962. Eggleston’s exhibition was one of the first, and the one that changed opinion.
What is a dye transfer print?
It is a color print built up from three gelatin matrices, each carrying cyan, magenta or yellow dye, rolled in turn onto prepared paper. The process was used for advertising prints and gives strong saturation and a wide range of tone. Kodak stopped making the materials in 1994.
What camera did William Eggleston use?
His first camera was a Leica given to him by a friend at Vanderbilt University. By the late 1960s color transparency film was his main material. A later book, Polaroid SX-70, published in 2019, collects pictures he made with that instant camera.
William Eggleston is one of the photographers in the A to Z of photographers.