William Eggleston is a pioneer of color photography. He began working in color in the late 1960s, but it was his 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that helped to establish that color photography was no longer intended solely for commercial applications. In fine-art photography, color goes beyond description and decoration and instead becomes a key factor in a picture’s content.
Raised in Mississippi on the family cotton farm, Eggleston produces much of his work in southern locales. Portraits, interiors, architecture, and landscapes are at the core of his visual vocabulary, but he directs his camera in unusual ways—oblique angles and off-kilter perspectives—that tend to abstract the scene. Untitled, made in the late 1970s, is an upward glance at a vine-wrapped wood fence post contrasted against a robin’s-egg blue sky and a very distant smattering of clouds. The latter recall Alfred Stieglitz’s early twentieth-century images of clouds, the Equivalents, which marked the first foray into intentional photographic abstraction.
Eggleston has been playing the piano since the age of four, calling it his first love, and continues to play daily as a form of meditation. In 2017, he released his debut album, Musik, which includes recordings he has made since the 1980s. Thirteen tracks, remastered by producer Tom Lunt, feature Eggleston’s improvisations on Bach, Handel, Gilbert and Sullivan, and jazz standards. Film director David Lynch has described these pieces as “music of wild joy with freedom and bright, vivid colors,” which quite literally relates back to Eggleston’s achievements in photography.
Rebecca Morse, Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department
2024
Bibliography
O’Hagan, Sean. “William Eggleston: “the music’s here then it’s gone—like a dream.” The Guardian, November 19, 2017.
