WILLIAM EGGLESTON
Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973
© 2018 William Eggleston / Courtesy Kicken Berlin
Biography
William Eggleston (American, born 1939) grew up on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta and attended Vanderbilt University. He taught himself photography in 1957 guided by the works of Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson. From the 1960s on he worked exclusively in color, capturing captured everyday situations and objects from unusual angles and heightening their reality through color-intensive dye transfer prints. In 1967 he met Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and John Szarkowski in New York. In 1976 the Museum of Modern Art presented his first solo show, which marked not only his personal breakthrough but also that of color photography in the art world. Since the 1970s, Eggleston’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums and institutions worldwide. In 2008, a major career-spanning survey, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Videos 1961-2008 was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Haus der Kunst in Munich. More recent exhibitions include those held at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2009 (traveled to Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden, both 2010); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2013; Tate Modern, London, 2013; National Portrait Gallery, London, 2016, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018.
