William Eggleston, born in 1939 in in Memphis, Tennessee, first rose to fame in 1976 with his inaugural photographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Eggleston is widely credited with raising color photography to an art form. His first forays into photography wee in black-and-white, but in 1965 he began to experiment with color photography.
Critics at his first exhibition were shocked by his apparent disregard for the traditions of photography, and were particularly critical of the way in which he used dye-transfer methods, commonly associated at the time with advertising, to enhance the tonal potential of the natural colors which he captured with his camera. Much influenced by Walker Evans, Eggleston’s work seeks to search every minute inch of unremarkable life and celebrate the trivial, the important and the ugly as commonplace.
Eggleston managed to capture raw images and create art from everyday subjects. He also managed to capture the present, particularly that of his roots in the Deep South, without reverting to aesthetics or enhancement and was able to discover the surreal even in the most mundane of subjects
In his photograph entitled “Memphis, America” (1971), he depicts five plastic animals seemingly intent on marching to their doom by parading over the edge of the stainless steel surface on which they rest. The animals are depicted in the primary colors of red, blue and yellow and are shown in stark relief to their background of shiny grey steel and reflected light. Contrasts between the warmth of the colored plastic animals and the cold metallic background are evident and give the photograph a surreal quality, typical of his work.
Work Cited
Child, B. “Mapping the democratic forest: The postsouthern spaces of William Eggleston.” Southern Cultures 17.2 (2011): 37-54,120.
