Tag: William Eggleston

Throughout the ’70s, photographer William Eggleston captured the rural towns of the American South, where he took colour, concept and composition to new heights.

Most portrait artists attempt to differentiate the emotional essence of each individual subject. But William Eggleston, a father of color photography whose 1976 Museum of Modern Art exhibit arranged by John Szarkowski helped shepherd the medium into the art world — much to the chagrin of critics — insists that he photographs a person the same way he photographs a parking lot. A new exhibition of his portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in London, however, belies that assertion by displaying more than 100 highly personal images.

“I am at war with the obvious,” the photographer William Eggleston said in a conversation with the author Mark Holborn, which became the afterward in Eggleston’s 1989 book, “The Democratic Forest.”