Purple Perspective

William Eggleston has always been known as one of America’s most eminent photographers and is highly regarded for his vivid use and development of colour photography during the 1960s to 1970s as a well established medium at a period in time when it was ridiculed by artists and mainly limited to commercial advertising. Eggleston’s use of the dye transfer process, increasing the worth of his photographs as artistic objects, took his photography to a level that had never been seen before (ASX; 2015)  - his highly saturated images combined with the everyday commonality of his subject matter and his eccentric and poetic compositions lead him to become one of the most pivotal and well known documentary photographers of the 20 th century. Eggleston, a native southerner, photographed the ordinary life of the people and places surrounding his home in Memphis, Tennessee of “inconsequential moments in the American South, captured in such a manner that the colours practically glow.” (Cai...