William Eggleston Portraiture

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.” (Cain; 2016). Eggleston approached his photographs of the south with a critical eye and a new way of seeing that brought life and new observations to the typical farm landscape of the area. Eggleston himself once said "I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.” Over the past 50 years Eggleston has developed a powerful body of work featuring friends and family, musicians, artists and strangers.

One of Eggleston’s most powerful and visually successful photographs is one taken in the late afternoon of 1956 outside a large supermarket in Memphis, Tennessee. It is the time of day that one calls ‘golden hour’ as the warm sunlight catches the profile and golden locks of an absentminded teenage employee, who is clearly oblivious to Eggleston’s presence, as he collects and organises shopping trolleys; his silhouette cast on the building’s side while a woman looks on in the background.

Eggleston was once asked whether he photographed a person “the same way as you photograph a parking lot?” His answer was affirmative but also typically contradictory and vague to his nature as he is completely emotionally unattached to his subjects: “I think so, absolutely”. “This stated interest in the overlooked is not in any way to diminish the people in Eggleston’s photographs, but rather to underline that everything – however banal – is scrutinised and considered with equal intensity.” (Buck; 2016). To Eggleston nothing was more or less important than the other, all his photographs were of equal weighting to him because they all represented for him a moment in time carefully captured and composed with his use of experimental lighting techniques, tone and focus every imagine was carefully planned and thought out by Eggleston. To him, portraiture was about how people integrated into their environments the same way buildings fit into cities and farms  and fields belong to rural, open landscapes.The 1950’s was when Eggleston first started experimenting with colour film photography because for him the use of colour presented new challenges, that black and white photography could not give him, with many more subtle variables in shades and hues. Eggleston had an eye for composing an image with attention to the impact of colour and he used it in capturing moments of everyday life. 

During this time in America, especially the deep south where Eggleston lived, was massive struggle for the equal rights of African Americas during the Civil Rights movement of 1954-1968. The American Civil Rights Movement was a mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination towards, but not limited to, African Americans and people of colour in the deep South of America that became extremely important during the 1950s. Eggleston was a fair and democratic photographer and so his portraiture work showcases people of all racial ethnicity as he always tried to have no emotional connection to his subjects and viewed them as rather opportunity for interesting observation and capture, rather than anything else.

William Eggleston was a pioneer and genius of his generation. His careful compositions and mundane subject matter questioned the notion of surrounding beauty and his use of heightened colour revolutionised colour photography to become an acceptable fine art form.