Near the River at Greenville, Mississippi, 1986
Type C Print, 16" x 20"
William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939. He attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Delta State College in Cleveland, Mississippi, and the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Considered a master of color realism, Eggleston established his reputation as a photographer with his first one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976 at the age of thirty-seven. Since then he has exhibited internationally and has been widely published, including a portfolio of Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley, and a book, The Democratic Forest, a chronicle of the Western world from the Tennessee hills to the Berlin Wall. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship the following year. In addition to his work in photography, Eggleston is an accomplished draftsman and painter. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. A “street” photographer in the tradition of Henri Lartigue, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, Eggleston seeks to capture the elusive moment, often with a lurid, unsettling twist. His largely unpopulated images focus on seemingly insignificant everyday scenes realized in vivid, saturated colors.
*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.