William J. Eggleston

William Eggleston used brilliant color photography to bring a sense of otherworldly beauty and even mystery to ordinary objects and unique places alike, which helped to legitimize color photography as a viable art form and in turn, influenced generations of modern photographers. Born into a wealthy family in Memphis, Tennessee, he was raised on a former cotton plantation in Sumner, Mississippi. An introverted but observant child, Eggleston was drawn to the arts and in particular, visual imagery. He purchased his first camera in 1957 and began taking photographs while studying at several prominent schools, including the Vanderbilt University and the University of Mississippi; though he did not complete his studies at any of these institutions, Eggleston delved deep into the photographs of artists like Robert Frank, Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, all of whom would wield considerable influence on his own work. Initially, he worked with black-and-white film, but in the mid-1960s began to experiment with color, and produced thousands of photographs in that format. His subjects were often unremarkable by accepted standards of art: Eggleston photographed everyday objects like discarded bicycles or street signs, ordinary landscapes and average Americans, but through his use of color - especially in conjunction with a dye-transfer process usually employed for print advertising - lent complexity and drama to his images. Most notable among these was "The Red Ceiling" (1973), which depicted a bare light bulb in a socket jutting from a ceiling painted a full-bodied, bloody red. These and other works were printed in his first portfolio of dye-transfer photographs, 14 Pictures. Awards from the Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts preceded a much-lauded 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, as did teaching assignments at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and high-profile assignments for Rolling Stone, which commissioned him to photograph Plains, Georgia before the presidential election of Jimmy Carter, and from AT&T to photograph the Gulf States. Eggleston soon fixed his unique perspective on subjects as far-ranging as Kenya and Graceland Mansion, the home of Elvis Presley; he was also invited to document film sets for directors John Huston, David Byrne ("True Stories," 1986) and Gus van Sant. Though his work was frequently associated with the American South, Eggleston also photographed numerous international locales, including China, Japan, Berlin, Russia and Italy, as well as subjects closer to home: the Paramount Pictures lot, Coca-Cola bottling plants, Niagara Falls, and religious sites in Orange County, California. By the new millennium, Eggleston's body of work had received numerous tributes, including the Getty Images Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004 and a 2008 retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was also the subject of multiple documentaries, most notably Michael Almereyda's "William Eggleston in the Real World" (2005), and was made a member of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic in 2016. The following year, he issued his first album of instrumental compositions, appropriately titled Muzik.