William Eggleston

Described as one of the most influential and accomplished American photographers of the 20th century, William Eggleston pioneered the use of colour photography to document the transformation of life in the United States’ rural South. His vivid snapshots of the ordinary, including gasoline stations, automobiles and diners, responded to the vibrant and ephemeral nature of consumerism in 1960s; the same subject that fascinated the Pop artists. His informal compositions, candid portraits and use of a simple Kodak Brownie camera afforded his pictures a sense of intimacy and the familiar.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939, Eggleston began experimenting with black-and-white photography as a student at Vanderbilt University in the early 1960s, drawing on the work of documentarian photographers Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 1965 he made the decisive transition to using colour film, just as it began to appear on the mass market.

Between 1973 and 1974 Eggleston taught at Harvard, where he discovered the dye-transfer printing technique that resulted in one of his best known images, The Red Ceiling (1973). ‘When you look at the dye it is like red blood that’s wet on the wall,’ he said of the picture’s intense and saturated shades of scarlet.

Eggleston’s colour images had first caught the attention of MoMA’s director of photography John Szarkowski in 1969, with the institution acquiring one of his works. Seven years later, the museum mounted his solo show 14 Pictures — now considered a watershed moment, when colour photography was first heralded as a fine art form on such an important stage.