William Eggleston

On Wednesday we watched a documentary on a photographer called William Eggleston. It was glimpse of how he works and takes his photographs, as well as other well-known photographers talking about his work and how it influenced them, such as the like of Martin Parr.

William Eggleston has spent the last 50 years documenting his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. A place often described as quite a boring and dull place throughout the documentary by various people. This is what photographer Juergen Teller had to say about his first time visiting and how disappointed he was.

The famed Magnum photographer Martin Parr explains how radical it was for Eggleston to be shooting in colour in the late 1960′s when every other street photographer was still shooting in black and white.

He has done the majority of his work in Memphis, and photographs every day. Even after such a long time documenting his hometown, he still feels the drive and desire to find parts of Memphis that he hasn't discovered yet.

What William is photographing is very much against the tradition and the normal stuff of photography. William Eggleston wasn't so interested in photographing “art photography” but what simply interested him and breaks all the rules of traditional rules of taking a picture.

I soon started to appreciate his vision after looking at some of his work more closely. What I initially thought were stupid photographs of ordinary, boring everyday stuff. He wasn’t interested in photographing ‘decisive moments’ nor was he interested in capturing obscure characters or extraordinary moments. He was all about finding the beauty in the boring.

His images, they are so vivid, full of life, and you can see that he has a very good understanding of use of colour in his photographs. His images aren’t just of random colours, but there is a very subtle form of coordination in his photographs. For example, many of his photographs have primarily warm tones in the background like red, orange, or yellow, yet his subject of interest may be of a very cold colour like blue, green, or violet which pops out at you. William Eggleston is one of the greatest innovators of colour photography. What he was doing at the time was quite far-reaching, not shooting in black and white as other serious photographers were doing.

But Eggleston didn't shoot in colour because he wanted fame or anything of the sort. Rather, he found colour to be more of a challenge and fascinating than black and white. He didn’t complain that he lived in a pretty boring place. He would rather focus on documenting his own hometown in a very personal way, taking photographs every day and looking for the brilliant light and colour which made his community unique.

Eggleston’s photographs are not taken from a normal eye level. Adjusting the usual perspective of the viewer, Eggleston makes new angles and causes different atmospheres making the viewer look at objects from another viewpoint. An example of this is, Eggleston’s famous picture of a child’s bicycle with three wheels which was taken from a very low angle from below, making the rather small childlike object seem huge.

William also makes use of natural light a lot. That means he’s not gathering artificial lighting to lighten the scenes of his photos. The photo shown below is a good example. In that image of a parking lot, the evening light and the shadows from the sun going down highlight the warm tones of the scene.