William Eggleston Case Study

William Eggleston is an America photographer who is widely known and credited for taking pictures of urban or decaying scenes that most people would find uninteresting and horrible to look at. However through out the years he has had them printed and placed in a gallery for an exhibition.

Most of the work he produces is things that are either left to decay or have a strange urban sense to them, For example the image below is of a kids trike that has been dumped and left on the street. The image overall from my point of view has a sense of decay as there is no one around the bike and the bike looks to be in poor condition giving a sense that it has not been very well looked after.

The purpose of his work is to show ordinary life but in an unusual way. His work has been seen in many galleries and portfolios through the world. A list of his publications can be seen below.

·      The earliest commercial use of Eggleston’s artwork was in the album covers for Memphis group Big Star, who was an American rock band. 

·      In 1974, 14 dye transfer pictures that he printed were published by Julian Hohnenburg and distributed by Harry H Lunn Jnr in Washington DC.

·      Seven Chromogenic coupler prints were published by Caldecot Chubb in New York, during 1979.

·      Troubled waters, Fifteen of these images were published by Caldecot Chubb

Eggleston has quote many things about his work like what he finds makes the image and what he found inspiration for taking images. However the quote that stands out for me the most is the following

The Observer News paper developed a piece of work on Eggleston showing the pieces of work that he has done. A quote from the piece that stood out for me is the following :-

“It would be difficult to imagine the world according to David Lynch, Gus Van Scant, Juergen Teller or sofia coppala without the world”.

My opinion on his work is that it is interesting to look at and develop ideas from. This is due to the way he has captured his images, his images are to show life but in an unusual way, and as you can see from looking at his push bike image he does this well as, he shows a normal scene around what can be seen in the background as an everyday human life.