Prior to the 1960s, color photography was primarily associated with advertising and fashion. Pioneering artists such as William Eggleston were the first to experiment with color as a stylistic device, reinventing the medium of photography as a vehicle for serious artistic expression. Eggleston’s works in particular capture ordinary motifs from unorthodox perspectives, cleverly highlighting them through formally self-contained expanses of color. Or so it is always said – mainly by Eggleston himself. Self-taught and never having to work for a living – he was born into a family of wealthy cotton planters in Memphis, Tennessee in 1939 – he claims to choose his subjects entirely by happenstance. A woman dressed to the nines waits next to a dinosaur diorama (why?). An old man sits chatting on his bed with a gun (for whom?). One girl consoles another (for what?). Eggleston, William & Morris, William (1990). Faulkner's Mississippi. Birmingham: Oxmoor House. ISBN 0-8487-1052-5.

Eggleston has lived a very unconventional and colorful life. When he was younger, there was plenty of drugs, booze, guns, and women. These themes made it into his work. In the early 1970s, his friend, Andy Warhol introduced him to Viva, a woman working at Warhol's Factory who became Eggleston's mistress. Warhol also introduced Eggleston to Pop art and the emerging film scene, both of which he would take an interest in. He briefly experimented with Polaroids, automatic photo-booth portraits, and video art, but became particularly inspired by Pop art's appropriation of advertising; commercial images with their saturated colors. William Eggleston, a cor Americana, Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [catalogue] (solo exhibition) New York: Doubleday, 1989. ISBN 978-0-385266-51-2. With an introduction by Welty and an afterword by Eggleston and Mark Holborn.Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 1999, 2008, 2011. ISBN 978-0-944092-70-5. With a text by Bruce Wagner.

William Eggleston: Los Alamos, September 27 – November 10, 2012". Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. April 12, 2018. The unvarnished Americana for which he is so famous – brash logos and a hint of rust – can contain something uneasy, even threatening, precisely because Eggleston maintains a blithe poker-face about his feelings on his subjects. Walking through this exhibition is to meet more placards marked “Untitled” than you can handle. The names of previously anonymous sitters, revealed specially for this exhibition, are hardly likely to make things much more concrete for the viewer. Rather we are let in on an extraordinary experience, moving between the mysterious faces of a transitional moment in American history, not quite sure whether some greater revelation is bubbling under the surface. Eggleston, William", in Warren, Lynne, ed. (2006). Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography. Vol.1. New York: Routledge. pp.430–435. ISBN 978-1-135-20543-0here: p.433 {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript ( link)This exhibition is the first comprehensive museum exhibition devoted to Eggleston’s remarkable portraits. These works capture family, friends, casual acquaintances and strangers in a series of eloquent, poetic character studies and collectively form a social portrait of a time, place and way of life. Throughout the years that followed, Eggleston published a number of portfolios, including Election Eve in 1976, The Morals of Vision in 1978, and Troubled Waters in 1980. In addition, Eggleston photographed the sets of several films, such as Annie and True Stories, in 1986. He also completed several record album covers for groups such as Big Star, Alex Chilton, Primal Scream, and Christopher Idylls. In 2003, Eggleston published Los Alamos, which contained his work from 1966 to 1974. He has also made a few media appearances, including a cameo in the movie Great Balls of Fire and a Marc Jacobs print advertisement. The Thrill of the Chase: The Wagstaff Collection of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles [itinerary: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Portland Museum of Art, Maine] [catalogue] 2015 William Eggleston Selected Exhibitions 2015:

Following the death of his wife, Rosa, in 2015, Eggleston reluctantly vacated the family home for this large apartment in a well-heeled residential “retirement community”. Alongside the piano stands a state-of-the-art hi-fi system and some huge speakers. “One of the advantages of being here is that all the neighbours are deaf. I can play the piano loudly all night if I want to. I often do.” Four Portfolios, Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Memphis, USA (solo) 1994 From Graceland to Wasteland, Laurence Miller Gallery, New York, USA (solo) 1992 Ancient and Modern, Barbican Gallery, London, England (solo) Is the red of man and room leeched from the walls or the light (this is the location of the famous red ceiling)? Does the image foretell his fate? Knowing who is whom may help with the early Mississippi portraits – the resolute man in the ultra-white shirt turns out to be an evangelical pastor, the ringleted boy in dungarees a local gay hippy – but the later works retain their peculiar mundane mystery. “Stop” says the sign and the man in chinos pauses perilously on the curb – but does he stop for the sign, or the sight of the photographer?

Curator’s Tour

This photo was taken at the height of racial tensions in the South. The United States was legally a desegregated country, but some White southerners rebelled against this, refusing to let go of their Confederate identity. Eggleston plays on this theme in his photo. As the historian Grace Elizabeth Hale explains "the fusion of intimacy and inequality here would be at home in a daguerreotype of a young Confederate soldier and the young slave who accompanied him to war, and yet the clothes and the car drag the image into the 1970s present." This personal family photograph, overlaid with tensions of race, comes across so nonchalant. Yet, this candid moment creates an authentic picture of ingrained social biases. Eggleston 70/90, The Gallery of Contemporary Photography, Los Angeles, USA (solo) 1998 Fotomuseum Wintethur, Winterthur, Switzerland 1997 10.D.70. VI. Robert Miller Gallery, New York, USA (solo) The compositions in Musik have been brought to light from a collection of recordings stored on more than sixty digital audiotapes, digital compact cassettes, and floppy disks by the producer Tom Lunt, who first learned about the artist’s music from the 2005 documentary William Eggleston in the Real World. Describing the music in The Observer, Sean O’Hagan writes, "The great washes of synthetic sound, sometimes seductively symphonic, sometimes ominous, certainly add a new resonance to the photographer’s most famous quotation about being ‘at war with the obvious.’" Distinguished Achievement". Section "1990–1999". University of Memphis. memphis.edu. Retrieved 1April 2018. Charlie Boynkin, sheriff of Morton, Mississippi, would act as Eggleston’s bodyguard while he did night shoots in the town. Here we see him in his own bedroom, in what appears to be a scene of cosy domesticity. Distracted by the busyness of the bedspread, you almost miss the pistol he is unselfconsciously holding. For a non-American viewer the image could be a potent metaphor for the unspoken violence bubbling under the surface of everyday life – or it could just be an old man settling in after a hard night’s work.

Gefter, Philip (January 9, 2008). "Keeping It Real". Artinfo. Archived from the original on June 19, 2013 . Retrieved April 23, 2008. In art or life, William Eggleston has never adhered to tradition. Derided by critics in the early 70s as a vulgarian for daring to shoot the everyday in vivid colour, he is now regarded as a master of the medium. Other photographers had used colour, including Saul Leiter, Fred Herzog, Helen Levitt and his friends William Christenberry and Stephen Shore, but no one had done so with the same vivid tonal palette and disorienting compositional force. “What he was doing in the 70s,” Martin Parr once remarked, “was so far ahead of the game that it was revolutionary.” Democratic Camera, Photographs and Videos 1961 – 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA (solo) Naturally, Eggleston’s prodigious way of seeing drew evermore creative characters into his orbit: portraits of Dennis Hopper, Joe Strummer, Fred Dowell and Andy Warhol ‘Superstar’ Viva are all on show too, seamlessly knitted with images of his family, friends and strangers.

William Eggleston’s way of looking at the world and his singular pictorial style reverberate across contemporary visual culture.

a b "Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Award". Royal Photographic Society . Retrieved August 13, 2012. When I inquire whether he is classically trained, he looks at me askance. “I can read scores but I cannot sight read. Not that it matters. Sight reading is nothing to do with the aesthetics of music. In fact, people who are good at it absolutely cannot improvise.” For him, playing the piano alone each day is a kind of meditation. If others are present, though, it is a different story. “I need a drink down me to give me courage to play you something,” he says early on. “It really does help. A little bit of alcohol, as you must know, calms one down and lets one think not so much about the world out there but what’s in here.” (He taps his forehead.) Hagen, Bettina (September 2021). "Vintage, C-Print – was denn jetzt? Ein Sammlerseminar zur Fotografie von William Eggleston". Die Welt.