William Eggleston, (27 July, 1939) Memphis Tennessee. He grew up on the very fringe of the Mississippi Delta, where he continues to work to this day. He bought his first camera, a Canon Rangefinder in 1957 and after a very short time working in black and white he switched to colour in 1965, which is what he became known for. He would take most of his photos in his hometown, Memphis. He would photograph everyday objects and people, yet he would manage to make it look so different that you would just want to go up and look what the photo is of.
There is no political perspective in Eggleston’s work. His work is not a protest or any social engagement. He does not seek out a story or a subject-matter. His subjects of everyday objects are barely subjects at all. They are just lone objects, often seen at an uncustomary angle to the vertical or horizontal, so that we begin to feel vertiginous as we stare at them.
Eggleston’s style uses bold colourful interiors, cars and gasoline stations and portraits of individuals know to Eggleston as well as strangers which he just found in the street. He has an awareness of the complexity of the formal arrangement of the frame, often using strong diagonal lines and reflections, but he also uses strong contrasts in colours. Although these photographs are showing a certain place at a certain time, Eggleston is not bothered with trying to document these dates, instead when asked Eggleston just says that he is photographing ‘Life today’.
Eggleston is known for his rich and complex images of the American South, and he is largely credited with establishing the acceptance of colour in fine art photography. He began to experiment with colour in the 1960s and at the time, colour photography was largely associated with commercial industries, especially advertising, and so it was not considered fine art photography. In 1972 he began making prints using a highly complex and expensive process called ‘dye transfer’, which allows various colours within a photographic print to be printed as separations. Each colour is printed in its richest form, maintaining strong red and green tones within a single image. The prints are also very durable and will not fade. Eggleston saw a use for heightened colour; in fact, his colours can be shrill to the point of near hysteria. He photographs objects that are both ordinary and much particularised, and then intensifies the tension that surrounds those objects by infecting their atmosphere with shrill colours. He is obsessed by the imaginative possibilities of the ordinary. He wants us to use our eyes until we see without bias the nostalgia of the seeming banalities of the everyday.
