WILLIAM B. EGGLESTON (b. 1939)

WILLIAM B. EGGLESTON William Eggleston, is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium to display in art galleries. Eggleston captures ordinary everyday urban American life from unexpected perspectives. His control of form, and the way in which he frames his subjects, invests his photography with a certain narrative potential and theatricality. In 1973, he discovered dye-transfer printing and started using it extensively, partly because of the brilliant colour saturation it affords.

Some of his early series have not been shown until the late 2000s. The Nightclub Portraits (1973), a series of large black-and-white portraits in bars and clubs around Memphis was, for the most part, not shown until 2005. Lost and Found, part of Eggleston’s Los Alamos series, is a body of photographs that have remained unseen for decades because until 2008 no one knew that they belonged to Walter Hopps; the works from this series chronicle road trips the artist took with Hopps, leaving from Memphis and traveling as far as the West Coast. Also not editioned until 2011, Eggleston’s Election Eve photographs were taken prior to the 1976 presidential election in Plains, Georgia, the rural seat of presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, and along the road from Memphis, Tennessee.

ARTWORK

WILLIAM B. EGGLESTON
Untitled (From Election Eve)
archival pigment print
32 1/2 x 48 1/4 in.
WILLIAM B. EGGLESTON
Untitled (Blue Car, From Dust Bells, Vol. 11)
archival pigment print
31 1/2 x 48 in.
WILLIAM B. EGGLESTON
Untitled (From Democratic Forest)
archival pigment print
31 1/2 x 48 in.
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