Bill Eggleston was born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he lives still with his wife Rosie. His youngest son Winston works as his assistant. Bill doesn’t talk much about his photographs, because he believes they shouldn’t be explained. He will recall what he was doing when he took the shot and he will talk about its development but he will not tell us his intent behind the motif. Photographs “have nothing to do with words.”
The Guide to his major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 1976 cites his influence as Henri Cartier Bresson’s Decisive Moment. It is little known that he spent much of his childhood in the care of his maternal grandfather, Joseph A. May, a judge who was a serious photographer. His grandfather had the greatest influence on his life as a photographer. Bill played in his grandfather’s dark room and got his first Brownie camera with he was 10 years old. That was the same year that his grandfather had a heart attack. Bill was in the next room when it happened. “My whole world collapsed” he told the film maker Michael Almereyda. He goes on on to suggest that Eggleston’s work can be seen as a “process of unconscious recovery and it reflects a child’s elevated experience of the world. “
Reference: William Eggleston in the Real World, DVD
An early Eggleston, photo of his cousin on the right, two girls at a party. The girl on the left has been crying and the blonde girl wants to know why. It looks almost like a 19th century Romantic painting. This is one of his few traditional photographs. His friends said he was so quiet at parties, he was able to move around and take close-up shots almost unnoticed. He had the characteristics of a photographer, silent, patient and watchful at a young age.
His career could be sandwiched between two major exhibitions the1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC and the retrospective over 30 years later at the Whitney. I imagine him still taking pictures today.
Introduction to the Guide for the Solo Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, 1976
The 1976 MOMA exhibition was a major breakthrough as the first color photography show and it was very controversial. The reviews were scathing, with expressions like “snap shots,” and “purposely boring” and even a letter from Ansel Adams declaring that Eggleston’s work should not be on the wall of a gallery. Since then Eggleston has been honored and praised as the Father of Color Photography and “one of the most significant figures in contemporary photography.”
His retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney brought him recognition and better reviews. This review in The New Yorker, William Eggleston at the Whitney, for example. "His eye for epiphanies in the everyday raises suspicions that, without his aid, we miss more than we see of what falls within our gaze. The effect involves techniques that seem hardly fair in straight photography - dye transfer printing, an arduous and expensive process (mooted, of late, by digital technology) which employes screens of magenta, cyan blue, and yellow to manipulate color. But there's no gainsaying Eggleston's results. He shoots like a shutterbug and executes like a painter."
He was sent on an assignment by Rolling Stone to shoot photos of Candidate Jimmy Carter. When he found Carter was not home, he instead photographed the "glamorous drabness of the town and its ambient countryside"
"He belongs to a generation of Americans who elevated photography to the rank of a major art." He was advised by a colleague to photograph what he did not like, so he headed into shopping malls, looking for what was tawdry.
"All glory, such as it is, accrues to the art of photography, which doesn't care what it beholds even as it burns it, through the eye, into the soul." Peter Schjeldahl
Don't be put off by his undignified subjects and his search for the ordinary. He declared himself "an enemy of the ordinary." I believe he wants us to see beyond it, to see the passage of time, to see a world of decay and becoming.