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...

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...