William Eggleston
William Eggleston (born July 27, 1939) is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium.
Eggleston began his career shooting in black and white, at a time when black and white photography had begun to be accepted as an art form. To the left edge of the frame, a female employee behind a counter of doughnuts and pastries glances at the camera, acknowledging the photographer’s presence. Eggleston reveals a vacant shop, as he looks across its empty space.
Taken straight on but slightly tilted, the teenage boy’s profile and left arm register the warm afternoon sunlight, casting a shadow on the wall of the store. In the background, a well-dressed woman walks towards the store and the boy with the carts. The boy’s absentminded expression may be inconsequential. However, the dramatic lighting casts a golden aura over his profiled face, left arm, and upper torso, lifting him out of the everyday.
Eggleston makes this picture visually interesting by playing with scale. By shooting from a low angle, the tricycle, a small child’s toy, is made gigantic, dwarfing the two ranch houses in the background.
This photo depicts Eggleston’s uncle Adyn Schuyler Sr. and Jasper, a longtime family servant who helped raise Eggleston, in the midst of watching a family funeral. The mimicry between the men’s stances creates a sense of intimacy between them. As Eggleston puts it, “it’s like they’ve been together for so long they’ve started standing the same way.”
One of Eggleston’s most famous pictures, Untitled (Greenwood, Mississippi) also known as The Red Ceiling, depicts a close-up view of the intense, red ceiling and far corner of a friend’s guest room. This all-consuming, blood-red color combines with the cropped erotic poster to charge the photograph with an unsettling sense of mystery and sexual undertone.
In this work, a lone man crosses the street, walking towards a Citgo gas station with his back to the photographer. On the side of the station, a parked car sits with its hood up ready to be worked on, but no mechanic is present. Eggleston’s work has an implied narrative, but never an explicit context. It is the implied narrative of the rural south that provides the tension or anecdotal character to the picture.
This is a snapshot of Eggleston’s son Winston when he was 21 years old.The angle of the shot is askew, capturing the son’s mood while his eyes engage the viewer.This daytime scene taken inside the house suggests an intimacy between father and son, who does not shy away from being photographed.
In this photo, The grass is out of focus, in fact almost nothing is in focus except the shaft of vision from her eyes to ours, and back to her hand holding a rival camera. The beads on her dress, glowing like redcurrants, recede into mist. It is such an ecstatic image that you can’t help wondering if the girl meant something special to Eggleston.
This is One of Eggleston’s most disturbing pictures. It is of a naked man in a red room scratching his head while a cigarette burns to ash on the dresser. “God” and “Tally ho!” are spray-painted on the wall. This has always seemed part of some unknowable life in the deep south, but the man turns out to be a dentist friend, good for handing out drug prescriptions.
The majority of his photos were taken during “golden hour” when the light is the softest at either sunrise or sunset. Therefore the images gleam with warmth and beauty– which really made me calm down and appreciate the nature of his photos.
You can see that Eggleston has a very good understanding of color theory. His photographs aren’t just of random colors, but there is a very subtle form of harmony in his photographs. For example, many of his photographs have primarily warm tones in the background (like red, orange, or yellow)– yet his subject of interest may be of a very cold color (blue, green, or violet) which pop at you.
As street photographers, we tend to gravitate towards finding the extraordinary moments in life. We want to find the craziest-looking characters, the strangest gestures, and moments that seem quite surreal. However Eggleston took this convention and flipped it on his head. He wasn’t interested in the crazy and odd things in life. Rather, he was drawn to the everyday, boring, and the banal– and wanted to show the inherent beauty of things that we often overlook.
Eggleston captured this moment as if whiling driving by, something had caught his eye. For him, the ides of a good photo versus the feeling or the emotions associated to a certain photo, and this doesn’t necessarily mean that your photo has to have a great composition.
He focused mainly on everyday objects and its really interesting when he says that his interest for the simple subjects was based on their shapes, colors and formal qualities rather than because they signified anything.
However his framing choices his subjects always evoke feelings of either nostalgia of amazement of joy.
Egglestons photography is also special in the way it captures the myth of the American landscape like there something missing in it. A sort of democratic wilderness.
Eggleston called his approach “photographing democratically” — wherein all subjects can be of interest, with no one thing more important than the other. A photograph of an empty living room, or a dog lapping water on the side of the road…
…or a woman sitting on a parking-lot curb were all equal in front of his lens.
Los Alamos is a project completed right around 1974 and it was born during road trips that Eggleston made with his friend Walter opps between 1965 and 1974. The subjects of this project often found in a vast American terrain yet aclmowledgd his belief in the aesthetic consequences of his private quest.
Another major project of Eggleston titled Election Eve was fired during a trip from Memphis to plains in the state of Georgia which is the hometown of president jimmy Carter. This project reunites images of country side, lonely roads, and buildings and also reunites ideas of emptiness and sets up a portrait of a small town.
Sources:
http://www.artnet.com/artists/william-eggleston/
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/eggleston-william/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylwMIKJBxTw