Who is he?

Since the early 1960s, William Eggleston used color photographs to describe the cultural transformations in Tennessee and the rural South. He registers these changes in scenes of everyday life, such as portraits of family and friends, as well as gasoline stations, cars, and shop interiors. Switching from black and white to color, his response to the vibrancy of postwar consumer culture and America’s bright promise of a better life paralleled Pop Art’s fascination with consumerism. Eggleston’s “snapshot aesthetic” speaks to new cultural phenomena as it relates to photography: from the Polaroid’s instantaneous images, the way things slip in and out of view in the camera lens, and our constantly shifting attention. Eggleston captures how ephemeral things represent human presence in the world, while playing with the idea of experience and memory and our perceptions of things to make them feel personal and intimate.

Color has a multivalent meaning for Eggleston: it expressed the new and the old, the banal and the extraordinary, the man-made and the natural. His non-conformist sensibilities left him open to explore the commercial printing process of dye transfer to see what it could contribute to picturing reality in color rather than the selling of lifestyles, concepts, and ideas. His brief encounter with Warhol exposed him to forms of popular photography and advertising, contributing to his experimental attitude toward the medium. Eggleston’s use of the anecdotal character of everyday life to describe a particular place and time by focusing either on a particular detail, such as an object, or facial expression, or by taking in a whole scene pushes the boundaries of the documentary style of photography associated with Robert Frank and Walker Evans’ photographs. His insider view allowed him to create a collective picture of life in the South, capturing how it transformed from a rural into a suburban society. Some examples of his work can be seen below:

The snapshot aesthetic provided Eggleston with the appropriate format for creating anecdotal pictures about everyday life. Its association with family photographs, amateur photography, as well as Kodak’s Brownie camera (which was useable by everyone) lent his work the proper proportions and personal attitude toward the impersonal everyday. I wanted to make colour one of my main focuses when photographing the selected areas, here I found that looking and analyzing an image would prove to be most effective as it would allow an insight for me into the technical, visual and conceptual aspects of the photo that make it so aesthetic through over-saturation. The image I have chosen is called “Cannon’s Grocery, near Greensboro, Ala” and was taken 1972:

Visual: Visually the image is very aesthetic from the amount of warm colours that are present within it such as the oranges, yellows and blues. For me these colour provide us with a sense of uniqueness as all supposedly contrast each other, however instead it compliments with the colours of the building reflecting the surrounding environment like the desert and sky. Overall the piece only consists of about four to five different colours making it very simplistic regarding what can be seen, however a filter has been used to enhance the yellows and blue and create an almost artificial environment of something that may be seen on a movie set. What draws me in is how out of place the building seems as it vibrant colours are perhaps the opposite of what the desert could be seen as, giving the impression for viewers of something that could be seen for miles due to it being so out of place from its surrounding environmental landscape.

Technical: When looking over the photograph it is clear to say that a filter has been used to create an artificial feel to the overall piece due to certain colours like yellow being implicitly present through the image. A regular shutter speed and slightly lower higher exposure has been used to create a crisp and in focus shot being devoid of overpowering shadows or motion blur. The photographer has obviously made the building the focal point of the piece due to how it instantly draws the viewers attention due to its randomness regarding the surrounding environment with the yellow sand being used as a way to stop the building from dominating the composition and being too overpowering. Finally the colours have definitely been taken into consideration due to how each one contrasts another colour within the photo providing an obvious sense of old school aestheticism due to how they aren’t as crisp as they could be.

Conceptual: The image was taken at a time when the art world shunned colour photography. The solo show the Eggleston but on at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 broke through this black and white barrier as it paved the way for wider acceptance of art and making it the preferred medium. The photograph itself represents the exciting time period in photograph when an image’s tone was more provocative than its subject.