William Eggleston

The Year in Pictures has a great little post on William Eggleston and the new show. I have always been fascinated by Eggleston's pictures. They seem so simple, and yet they draw you in and keep you engaged. I love that about a still photograph. Take a moment and read the whole thing.

The Year in Pictures: William Eggleston: "The photographs coming up for sale present a wide cross section of Eggleston’s work – some of his best pieces and some less so. The sale lacks his most famous single work, the seminal “Red Ceiling”, but it has images from most of Eggleston’s important series and includes a full set of the Los Alamos portfolios – 75 dye transfer prints taken from 1965 to 1974 encompassing all of the artists major concerns and themes. (The set is estimated at a lowball figure of $350,000 - $550,000 but is probably worth more in the $1 million range.)

Eggleston’s story is equally colorful (no pun intended). Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised in Sumner, Mississippi, Eggleston was an introverted and artistic child who took up photography when a friend gave him a Leica camera. Originally influenced by the work of Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, Eggleston began experimenting with color as early as 1965 and seems to have developed his trademark aesthetic pretty much on his own. A renowned boozer, womanizer, and charmer, his earliest patrons were MoMA’s John Szarkowski and the Corcoran’s Walter Hopps and their patronage led to a teaching job at Harvard in the mid 70s."