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Summary
In 1976, William Eggleston's hallucinatory, Faulknerian images were featured in the Museum of Modern Art's first one-man exhibition of color photographs. He has been called “the beginning of modern color photography” (John Szarkowski, MoMA) and “one of the most significant figures in contemporary photography” (Charles Hagen, NY Times). It is rare for an artist of such stature to allow himself to be shown as unguardedly as Eggleston does in Michael Almereyda's intimate portrait. The filmmaker tracks the photographer on trips to Kentucky, Los Angeles and New York, but gives particular attention to downtime in Memphis, Eggleston's home base. The film shows a deep connection between Eggleston's enigmatic personality and his groundbreaking work, and also reveals his parallel commitments as a musician, draftsman and videographer. Eggleston, age 65, has become an icon and inspiration to artists worldwide.
ABOUT WILLIAM EGGLESTON
Born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised on a cotton plantation in Sumner, Mississippi, William Eggleston became a crucial figure in the history of color photography by artistically examining the ordinary in his native South. Controversial at first, Eggleston's work is today recognized among the most striking and influential of the last half of the 20th century. Eggleston continues to live and work in Memphis.
In the early 1960s, Eggleston attended Vanderbilt University, Delta State College, and the University of Mississippi, although his talent lay in decidedly non-traditional and non-academic endeavors. The man who would eventually be called the “Father of Color Photography” had little commercial success until several years after an important visit to New York City in 1967.
In that year, Eggleston approached John Szarkowski, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, with an assortment of color slides, the likes of which would nearly a decade later comprise the exhibition William Eggleston's Guide. This exhibition, on view in 1976, was notable for being the first individual exhibition of color photography in MoMA's history, and it helped revolutionize the art world's perception of the medium. In the introduction to the catalogue, Szarkowski wrote: “as pictures, these seem to me perfect.” Before this groundbreaking exhibition, which eventually traveled nationwide, Eggleston had had only two individual exhibitions; the next year he had six.
Thereafter, Eggleston was widely exhibited annually in the United States and abroad. Numerous books and catalogues of his photographs have been published, and nearly 30 years after his art became prominent he continues to inspire debate. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and a National Endowment for the Arts Photographer's Fellowship in 1975, as well as the winner of The Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 1988 and the Gold Medal for Photography from the National Arts Club in New York in 2003. He received the Getty Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Center of Photography in 2004.
Eggleston's work is housed in the collections of the Foundation Cartier in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum
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