William Eggleston
William Eggleston (born 1939, Memphis, Tennessee) is a photographer widely credited with establishing colour photography as a serious and legitimate artistic medium. Raised in Sumner, Mississippi, Eggleston came to photography through self-directed study, developing a practice rooted in the observation of the American South and its overlooked, often mundane surfaces, rendered in colour of extraordinary precision and intensity.
His 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski, was the first solo exhibition of colour photography presented by the institution, a landmark moment in the history of the medium. Eggleston’s democratic eye, finding significance in the ordinary and the incidental, has exerted a profound influence on subsequent generations of photographers, filmmakers, and visual artists. Working primarily with dye-transfer printing, a process that produces colours of unusual saturation and depth, his images transform the familiar into something both strange and indelible.
His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. He lives and works in Memphis, Tennessee.