William Eggleston and the Revolution of Colour Photography
William Eggleston, frequently referred to as “the godfather of colour photography”, was one of the most prominent influencers in developing colour photography as a well established medium at a time when it was ridiculed by artists and mainly limited to commercial advertising. This combined with the everyday commonality of his subject matter; lead Eggleston to become one of the most pivotal documentary photographers of the 20 th century. Eggleston was born in 1939 in Tennessee and raised on his family’s cotton plantation in Mississippi, in the Deep South of America. Although he studied art at the University of Mississippi for about five years, Eggleston received no formal qualifications and after abandoning his education in the early 1960s, he began to explore the medium of photography by learning from books by famous photographers such as Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. Eggleston bought his first camera in 1957 and although he started shooting in black and w...