Photograph by William Eggleston, Untitled (Wonder Bread sign), from the series Southern Suite, dye transfer print, 1981

Colour photograph of a rusting tin sign, advertising bread, at the edge of a ploughed field with big blue sky above.

William Eggleston became interested in photography as a young man, studying the work of photographers such as Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans. He began to experiment with colour photography in the 1960s, working exclusively in colour by the late 1960s.

Eggleston, by this stage, was producing striking images of ordinary objects, the debris of human existence, the sentiment which aligned him with other young photographers such as Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus whom he met in New York in 1967.

Eggleston’s work gained international critical attention in 1976 when his photographs were shown at MoMA in New York. The prints were dye transfer colour photographs, a process that he had been experimenting with since the early 1970s. This was only the second exhibition of colour photographs to be held at MoMA. The exhibition proved to be controversial. The dye transfer process was predominantly a commercial medium, and the seeming formlessness and lack of intentional meaning of the images meant that many viewers doubted the intent of artist and the legitimacy of the work.

Eggleston continues to photograph in colour, producing throughout the late 1970s and 1980s portfolios and publications of his work in America, Europe and Africa.

William Eggleston (born 1939) changed the course of colour photography by translating the intense, super-real quality of colour transparencies into the saturated hues of dye transfer prints. Adopting processes previously used in advertising – the dye transfer technique was predominantly commercial at the time – Eggleston set a precedent for colour documentary and art photography that remains influential today. His work pinpoints the moment when colour began to be generally accepted as part of the language of art photography, and his subtle choices of camera positions loosened up photographers’ ideas about viewpoint.

In the early 1970s Eggleston began to photograph the realities of his own landscape in the American South. He finds ‘the uncommonness of the commonplace’ in ordinary scenes and places, as photographer Raymond Moore described it. Inspired by family snapshots, he focuses on the everyday and the overlooked in order to reveal them as remarkable.

PH.235-1983