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Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939, William Eggleston grew up in Mississippi, where his family owned a cotton plantation. After attending boarding school in Tennessee, he followed an irregular path through college, attending three different universities and graduating from none. He found little inspiration in academic pursuits, but, before the age of 20, he was exploring the handheld camera's potential for visual expression. For informal instruction in how best to use his expensive German camera, a Leica, he reviewed books such as Henri Cartier-Bresson's Decisive Moment (1952) and Robert Frank's The Americans (1959). Eggleston settled in Memphis in 1960, married, and had three children. He independently pursued a personal style that would be critiqued as anti-Formalist, anti-intellectual, even anti-artistic.
Leaving the still-insular South for visits to New York, Eggleston made contact with Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, who became a valued colleague. Although he eventually found the world of color more potent, Eggleston's incidental, subjectless vision was established in black and white. These sixties pictures might, in fact, be more relevant to his being tagged the "Confederate existentialist" or "Southern hipster." Eggleston took Winogrand at his word when he counseled him, "You can take a good picture of anything." "Anything" became the things you notice on your way to somewhere else, those that are foreign and all too familiar, those that made Memphis look just like the rest of suburban America. |
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