The Thrill of the Chase: The Wagstaff Collection of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles [itinerary: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Portland Museum of Art, Maine] [catalogue] 2015 William Eggleston Selected Exhibitions 2015: William Eggleston: Los Alamos, September 27 – November 10, 2012". Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. April 12, 2018. To make sense of the contradictions that define William Eggleston, the gentility and the wildness, the elegance and the excess, one must consider his childhood on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Born in Memphis in 1939, he grew up in the small town of Sumner, two hours’ drive away, where his grandfather, Joseph A May, was the judge. When Eggleston’s father, who studied engineering, married the judge’s daughter, he was given one of the family’s cotton plantations to run, which he did reluctantly and with little success. His parents, Eggleston tells me, were “much more progressive and understanding than the rest of the family so I did not have what you might call a traditional strict southern upbringing. In fact, not at all.” Eggleston seems blithely unconcerned by this, as only people from old money can be, while also being utterly assured – in his elegant, unassuming way – of his own genius. Alongside making music, he has been drawing and painting – abstract colour works that fill hundreds of notebooks – even longer than he has been making photography. “I haven’t tried writing yet, but I still might,” he says, smiling. “Drawing, painting and photography we could say are all run by the same rules – which don’t really exist.” I still believe in miracles: 30 years of Inverleith House, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Eggleston’s America was, and to a degree remains, both familiar in its vernacular iconography and alien in its almost Martian otherness. The novelist Donna Tartt detected “a sparkle of menace” in his most powerful images, a reading he remains baffled by. “I have been told that people have felt that in the pictures, but I don’t see it myself.” a b Harris, Gareth; Burns, Charlotte (March 29, 2013). "Court dismisses lawsuit over Eggleston reprints". The Art Newspaper.Eggleston holds an ongoing influence for subsequent generations of photographers and artists. He is best known for his pioneering use of colour and images of suburban life in the Southern United States. Eggleston has lived a very unconventional and colorful life. When he was younger, there was plenty of drugs, booze, guns, and women. These themes made it into his work. In the early 1970s, his friend, Andy Warhol introduced him to Viva, a woman working at Warhol's Factory who became Eggleston's mistress. Warhol also introduced Eggleston to Pop art and the emerging film scene, both of which he would take an interest in. He briefly experimented with Polaroids, automatic photo-booth portraits, and video art, but became particularly inspired by Pop art's appropriation of advertising; commercial images with their saturated colors.

This photo was taken at the height of racial tensions in the South. The United States was legally a desegregated country, but some White southerners rebelled against this, refusing to let go of their Confederate identity. Eggleston plays on this theme in his photo. As the historian Grace Elizabeth Hale explains "the fusion of intimacy and inequality here would be at home in a daguerreotype of a young Confederate soldier and the young slave who accompanied him to war, and yet the clothes and the car drag the image into the 1970s present." This personal family photograph, overlaid with tensions of race, comes across so nonchalant. Yet, this candid moment creates an authentic picture of ingrained social biases. Untitled, 1969-70 (the artist’s uncle, Adyn Schuyler Senior, with assistant and driver, Jasper Staples, in Cassidy Bayou, Sumner, Mississippi) Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, USA (solo) 2006 Spirit of Dunkerque, Lieu d'Art et d'Action Contemporaine, Dunkerque, France (solo)Democratic Camera, Photographs and Videos 1961 – 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA (solo) Camera Austria International. Laboratory for Photography and Theory, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria Eggleston, William & Morris, William (1990). Faulkner's Mississippi. Birmingham: Oxmoor House. ISBN 0-8487-1052-5. Eggleston also worked with filmmakers, photographing the set of John Huston's film Annie (1982) and documenting the making of David Byrne's film True Stories (1986). William Eggleston (American, b.1939) is a photographer who was instrumental in making color photography an acceptable and revered form of art, worthy of gallery display. Born and raised in the South, Eggleston was the son of an engineer and a local judge. He spent his childhood drawing, playing piano, and tinkering with electronics. Eggleston found great joy in cutting out the pictures in magazines and purchasing postcards, and had a love of visual media. He attended boarding school in his teens, followed by a year at Vanderbilt University. He continued on to Delta State College, which held his interest for only one semester. He studied for five years at the University of Mississippi, but still failed to receive a degree. While there, Eggleston became interested in photography.

William Eggleston and the Color Tradition, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, USA (solo) 1999 P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, USA His refusal to think of himself as a portraitist is what gives this exhibition such wry power. Here is a photographer who makes no distinctions, viewing every subject from cousins to coke cans with the same inscrutable gaze. When approached about the idea of a portrait show, the NPG’s Philip Prodger recalls, Eggleston expressed surprise because he didn’t “do” portraits. Prodger reframed the exhibition as a series of photos that just happened to have people in them. “That makes sense”, Eggleston deadpanned. O'Hagan, Sean (November 19, 2017). "William Eggleston: 'The music's here then it's gone – like a dream' ". London: The Observer . Retrieved November 24, 2017. Survey Grant, National Endowment for the Arts, for a survey of Mississippi cotton farms using photography and color video [34] [35]William Eggleston was born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he continues to live today. Raised in Sumner, Mississippi, he attended Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee; Delta State College, Cleveland, Mississippi; and University of Mississippi, Oxford. Charlie Boynkin, sheriff of Morton, Mississippi, would act as Eggleston’s bodyguard while he did night shoots in the town. Here we see him in his own bedroom, in what appears to be a scene of cosy domesticity. Distracted by the busyness of the bedspread, you almost miss the pistol he is unselfconsciously holding. For a non-American viewer the image could be a potent metaphor for the unspoken violence bubbling under the surface of everyday life – or it could just be an old man settling in after a hard night’s work. For Eggleston, there is just as much beauty and interest in the everyday and ordinary as in a photo of something extraordinary. Eggleston calls this his democratic method of photographing and explains that "it is the idea that one could treat the Lincoln Memorial and an anonymous street corner with the same amount of care, and that the resulting two images would be equal, even though one place is a great monument and the other is a place you might like to forget." This amateur color photograph of a teenage boy's portrait moves beyond the banal into the realm of the monumental, because of the tremendous effort put into orchestrating life down to the most menial task. As stated by David Zwirner, "We are honored to welcome William Eggleston to the gallery. One of the most important artists of our time, his painterly understanding of color and unmatched eye continue to exert an indisputable influence on visual culture." Great Balls of Fire (1989), directed by Jim McBride – Eggleston plays Jerry Lee Lewis's father, Elmo Lewis. [22]

Just as everyday scenes are singular moments, Eggleston takes only one photo of his subject. He allows his images to speak for themselves. Eggleston has said "There is no particular reason to search for meaning... A picture is what it is and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words." He may leave the work open to interpretation, and contradict himself by saying that there is no reason to search for meaning. However, if these pictures are like "little paintings" then they are loaded with the symbolic nuance, where a seemingly everyday scene has value for the individual caught in it - such as the boy's anticipation for something or someone - appearing at once empty of meaning, but also, full of potential. William Eggleston is a pioneering American photographer renowned for his vivid, poetic and mysterious images. This exhibition of 100 works surveyed Eggleston’s full career from the 1960s to the present day and was the most comprehensive display of his portrait photography to date. William Eggleston Portraits” brings together over 100 images from the American photographer, including shots of Clash singer Joe Strummer and actor-director Dennis Hopper among more anonymous faces.William Eggleston Portraits. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same title at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 21 July to 23 October 2016. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300222524. p.175 ("Chronology").