William Eggleston is an incredibly well known photographer, most known for his breath-taking colour photography, and even credited with helping photography be seen as a real artistic medium. For this project I want to focus on his Kyoto series, taken in 2001. These images show a variety of subjects, and expertly utilise colour and light, as well as reflections, similar to the other artists I have looked at, with Rinko Kawauchi even crediting him as an inspiration for her own work. When describing his own work, Eggleston states, ‘I wanted to see a lot of things in color because the world is in color. I was affected by it all the time, particularly certain times of the day when the sun made things really starkly stand out.‘

While on a school trip to Berlin, I had the opportunity to visit an exhibition of his work at the C/O Berlin, running from the 28th of January to the 4th of May. The exhibit documents his influence in the photography world, pioneering the use of colour for decades to come. Many of his images focus on the mundane, often exploring life in the American, however he has done an array of shoots worldwide.

The exhibit was well designed, placing Eggleston’s work in chronological order, allowing us to see his progression as a photographer as he transitioned from black and white to colour images. The exhibition also placed a large focus on Eggleston’s images taken in Berlin while the city was still divided, and juxtaposing them against his images of the United States.

This is one of my favourite images from the series, due to Eggleston’s vibrant use of colour and texture. The image features varying patterns, transitioning from the dirty floor tiles to the transparent plastic that helps unify the colours of the array of flowers. It feels simple, as if Eggleston had taken the image without much planning, able to capture the beauty within everyday life, a recurring theme within his entire body of work. ‘Everything must work in concert. Composition is important, but so are many other things, from content to the way colours work with or against each other,‘ says Eggleston about his work, further explaining the detailed thought process that goes into such simplistically beautiful images.