William Eggleston
As part of our first term assessment, we will need to write an academic essay on subject given by the course teacher. The photographer I will be writing about is William Eggleston. I have started to read up on him over the last two days and had an intensive look at some of his images (in particular his books “Eggleston’s Guide” and “Los Alamos”). The more I read about this photographer and the more I look at his images, the more I become fascinated about him and his work.
He is usually credited as the “inventor” of colour photography, not in the physical sense (colour photography had been around for a while in the early 70s) but his seminal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 paved the way for use of colour in documentary photography. Many photographers who have been using colour for documentary work afterwards owe their success (and the acceptance of their use of colour) to his ground-breaking work. Without Eggleston, there would be a different Martin Parr, Juergen Teller, Susan Meiselas, maybe even Alex Webb, to name but a few. And also the reception of some of Eggleston’s contemporaries such as Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and Paul Graham would have been very different.
And I think that Eggleston not only introduced colour in documentary photography but also quite a different grammar and formal approach than what was used in the then prevailing black and white documentary photography (for example, the positioning of his subjects in the frame).
Well, I have only begun to analyse his work. You will need to wait for a few weeks and read my essay to get my full thoughts on him :-) However, I guess he struck a particular note with me because in the continuum of photojournalism and documentary photography I see myself (also) at the documentary end. And I definitely want to work in colour. So I can see that Eggleston’s work will also be quite crucial for my own personal development as a photographer.
Here are two of my favourite Eggleston images (copyright “William Eggleston”, used from his website):
He is usually credited as the “inventor” of colour photography, not in the physical sense (colour photography had been around for a while in the early 70s) but his seminal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 paved the way for use of colour in documentary photography. Many photographers who have been using colour for documentary work afterwards owe their success (and the acceptance of their use of colour) to his ground-breaking work. Without Eggleston, there would be a different Martin Parr, Juergen Teller, Susan Meiselas, maybe even Alex Webb, to name but a few. And also the reception of some of Eggleston’s contemporaries such as Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and Paul Graham would have been very different.
And I think that Eggleston not only introduced colour in documentary photography but also quite a different grammar and formal approach than what was used in the then prevailing black and white documentary photography (for example, the positioning of his subjects in the frame).
Well, I have only begun to analyse his work. You will need to wait for a few weeks and read my essay to get my full thoughts on him :-) However, I guess he struck a particular note with me because in the continuum of photojournalism and documentary photography I see myself (also) at the documentary end. And I definitely want to work in colour. So I can see that Eggleston’s work will also be quite crucial for my own personal development as a photographer.
Here are two of my favourite Eggleston images (copyright “William Eggleston”, used from his website):
posted by rupert beagle at 10:59 am
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