William Eggleston - Photographer

[BerlinRocks]

i saw one exhibition last summer with a lot of his works (in a beautiful town in southern france) ...
i didn't know him before that ... he's really inspiring ...

anyway if i'm talking about it it's because he has a show in München (french press talk about it while they never did mention the exhibition i saw this summer ... french press never see what's going on in its own country when it's not in Paris ... really sad) right now while Robert Franck (who inspired him, as much as Beat Generation) has a show in Paris ...
I'm sure it would be very interesting to see both exhibitions ...

horsesthink.com - kultureflash.net - weblog.bezembinder.nl - thissavageart.com - lamontagnegallery - darkroadstedblend - vam - arttattler.com

 

[ellastica]

Mississippi River, summer 1973.

my favorite Eggleston image from the beautifully packaged 'Big Star: Keep an Eye on the Sky', CD Box Set.

my scan

 

[scotty pippin]

I just saw this Documentary William Eggleston in the real world. So worth a look.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Eggleston_in_the_Real_World

 

[BetteT]

Moderator Note:
Moved to Art & Design from Behind the Lens (because he is not a fashion photographer).

 

[Mchunu]

He's pretty incredible. Such beautifully unique photographs, he makes. My favorite Eggleston photo would have to be the one of the guy profile with a shopping cart. When my school had an exhibition of his work they had that image printed large on the side of the museum. I watched "William Eggleston in the real world"..it's a documentary on him and his work. Not really that great documentary (it's mostly just him running around shooting with his son tagging along-he seems to be a strange old man) but probably good for anyone to see if they're a big fan of his.

Something I really appreciate about Eggleston's body of work is that it has such a strong sense of place. I also really like the emphasis on design in many of his photographs, along with the snapshot aesthetic. And his photographs are different enough from each other to keep me interested. Some of them have been used as album covers.

Also, He shoots with a Pentax 67.

 

[Mchunu]

He has a new book out called "For Now". More info here: http://www.twinpalms.com/?p=forthcoming&bookID=4

 

[tangerine]

Thanks for the heads-up on the new book, Mchunu.

Here's some more info from nowness.com:

William Eggleston has long been lauded as one of photography's pioneers. But this year is looking especially good for him: tomorrow a major retrospective opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and this fall sees the publication of a new book, William Eggleston For Now, from Twin Palms Press. The book collects previously unseen photographs unearthed by filmmaker Michael Almereyda, whose movies includeNadja (1994), Hamlet (2000), and William Eggleston in the Real World (2005)), from Eggleston's picture archive. Here Almereyda offers a personal view on Eggleston's work.

William Eggleston’s photographs are always about looking. They distill a sense of heightened attention—alertness, anticipation, awe—from fragments of ordinary, unmanipulated reality. But the “ordinary” in Eggleston is often charged with an air of mystery and menace, a Halloween atmosphere leaking into every season he records. A quality of vulnerability and play converges with unease, dread, the possibility of mayhem.


This new book, William Eggleston For Now, presents over 90 previously unpublished color photographs pulled from Eggleston's back files, spanning four decades of work. The title is meant as an open nod to the immediacy of pictures plucked from near-oblivion, a salute to their freshness, their nowness. The selection is tidier, more self-contained, than I first expected––a bouquet brought back from an archival jungle. Most of the pictures feature people, and many of the subjects are the photographer’s blood relations and close friends. The emotional temperature is at once tender and aloof, extending to images of strangers in parking lots and suburban yards, which is aligned with Eggleston’s enduring fascination with frayed commercial spaces, cars, signs, cracked sidewalks, light bulbs, bricks, clouds, with rural porches, broken fences, spilled trash, ditches, puddles, architectural gaps and divides—the spaces between spaces, the mundane, the makeshift, all the fragmentary raw proofs of civilization as a perishable human construction that, nevertheless, provide subject matter for vibrant photographs.

When I reviewed a rough layout with Bill, he was pleased to see so many pictures he had clean forgotten about. He offered his approval alongside a bemused comment that the book comes close to being a family album.

nowness.com

And here are some of the images, from pdnphotooftheday.com:

pdnphotooftheday.com

I love Eggleston's work, primarily because of his use of color and his ability to elevate the seemingly mundane. I also enjoy the faint underlying sense of menace, or unease that many reviewers have noted. In this regard, he reminds me a little of David Lynch.

I like to work with color film myself, and the more I do, the more I appreciate just how amazing Eggleston's eye is.

I recently acquired a copy of Los Alamos and discovered that the sequencing in it is almost as amazing as the photographs.

 

[Mchunu]

I'm waiting for a book collector in Paris to get For Now, so i can purchase it. I know I could have easily pre-ordered it, but instead I like to get my books right in my hand immediately. The guy that I'm buying the book from has had several copies and sold them all..I think For Now is a must have.