William Eggleston

Red Ceiling, 1973

William Eggleston’s colour print exhibition at MOMA in 1976 transformed the perception that art photography should be limited to black and white.

It was the first time that commercial advertising printing techniques displaying vivid colour saturation effects had been used to produce fine art photography. His undramatic, snapshot style, aligned with using the most technically advanced printing processes, took the art world by storm. He took photographs of seemingly mundane, ordinary or trivial subjects and took them out of their context by transforming them into huge colour prints for display in a gallery. The ‘real’ subject then often became the colour itself. You could say that Eggleston used modernist techniques in a post-modernist way.

He has been a huge influence, or inspiration, on both later art photographers and filmmakers. An article from Style.com, November 8, 2008 notes "Eggleston's spare and richly hued pictures…have cast a spell on everyone from Sofia Coppola, David Lynch, and Larry Clark to Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Juergen Teller."

From Los Alamos, published 2003

William Eggleston website includes; news, full list of artist books, articles and essays, biography etc: http://www.egglestontrust.com/
Getty Museum: http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=1540
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Eggleston
Collection of reviews: www.salon.com