Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
William Eggleston's pictures revolutionized photography in subject matter and approach.
Born in Memphis in 1939, Eggleston spent his childhood with his grandparents in the tiny
rural Mississippi town of Sumner. The Delta would later figure in his photographs. As a
person,Egglestonisasmulti-sidedasadiscoball.Aninnovativeartistfromawealthyfam-
ily in a town that thought art was for sissies, Eggleston managed to keep a “gracious and
remote” quasi-aristocratic bearing, at least on the surface, according to journalist Richard
Woodward. He smoked and drank and wore jodhpurs. But a wild man was always on the
vergeofbreakingthroughhispatricianskin.Heshotoffgunsinthehouse,collectedDWIs,
kept his wife in one house and his mistress—one of them, anyway—in another.
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Eggleston's pictures were as original and unpredictable as his personality. He was
thirty-seven when The Museum of Modern Art in New York agreed to exhibit his work. It
was a momentous exhibit for several reasons, the first being color. Before the 1976 show,
photographers and critics considered only black-and-white photos to be artistic—color
photos were more suited to family snapshots, fitting for the masses but not for art. Eggle-
ston'ssecondinnovationwassubjectmatter.EgglestonphotographedtheMississippiofhis
childhood in full color, but he wasn't interested in the statues for the Confederate dead,
the antebellum mansions, the swollen-trunked cypress trees in the bayou. Eggleston's eye
wasattractedtodiscardedartifactsandthepeopleassociatedwiththem,objectsandpeople
so common as to be overlooked. As Eudora Welty described them, “…old tyres, Dr Pep-
per machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola
bottles, tornposters,powerpolesandpowerwires,street barricades, one-waysigns,detour
signs, No Parking signs, parking meters and palm trees crowding the same curb.”
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As momentous as the MOMA exhibition was, the night it happened, Eggleston was
nowhere to be found. A few of his friends, noticing the conspicuous absence, set out to
trackhimdown.TheyfoundhimattheChelsea,where,accordingtoEllisDuncan,ayoung
commodities trader from Alexandria, Virginia, Eggleston had been drawn in by the hotel's
dissolute pull.
ELLIS DUNCAN
We were in Dylan Thomas's old room having drinks, and Eggleston just decided
nottogototheopening.HehadcometoNewYorkfortheMOMAshow,butbe-
cause he was having such a good time partying at the Chelsea Hotel with Frank
Doggrell—having drinks and such—he missed the opening of his own work at
the MOMA!
Actually, his friends were able to drag him drunk to the exhibit that launched color photo-
graphy as a legitimate art. At first, critics were uniformly hostile to the show, one calling
it “cracker chic.”
The New York Times
dubbed it “the most hated show of the year.” There
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