William Eggleston American, 1939

“Eggleston was born and raised in the South. He has lived all his life between Mississippi and Memphis… The South is the central axis of his life, the sense of locality is a vital component of his work… Driving with him into the heart of the Mississippi Delta he is expansive about his roots. ‘This is Eggleston country,’ he exclaims.”

-Mark Holborn, William Eggleston: Ancient and Modern (New York: Random House, 1992), 11.

With his bright, observational pictures, William Eggleston helped legitimize color photography and spurred the fine art world’s recognition of the medium. His lush, mysterious still lifes and portraits captured the beauty and monumentality of the mundane; in uncurated tableaux filled with rich, analog color, Eggleston trained his lens on abandoned storefronts, lone lightbulbs, symbols of Americana, and the inhabitants of his Memphis hometown. Eggleston studied at Vanderbilt University, Delta State College, and the University of Mississippi. His breakout show, “Photographs by William Eggleston,” opened in 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art and helped cement his legacy as a vanguard of the burgeoning color photography movement. Since then, Eggleston has exhibited in cities around the world and enjoyed solo shows at institutions including Tate Modern, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.