Documentary photography research - William Eggleston, Tom

William Eggleston
As a boy, Eggleston was introverted and enjoyed playing the piano, drawing, and working with electronics. From an early age, he was drawn to visual media; he reportedly enjoyed buying postcards and cutting out pictures from magazines. Eggleston was also interested in audio technology as a child.
Eggleston taught at Harvard in 1973 and 1974, and it was during this period when he discovered dye-transfer printing when he was examining the price list of a photographic lab in Chicago. As Eggleston later recalled: "It advertised 'from the cheapest to the ultimate print.' The ultimate print was a dye-transfer. I went straight up there to look and everything I saw was commercial work like pictures of cigarette packs or perfume bottles but the colour saturation and the quality of the ink was overwhelming. I couldn't wait to see what a plain Eggleston picture would look like with the same process. Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed fantastic and each one seemed better than the previous one." The dye-transfer process resulted in some of Eggleston's most striking and famous work, such as his 1973 photograph entitled The Red Ceiling, of which Eggleston said, "The Red Ceiling is so powerful, that in fact I've never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction. When you look at the dye it is like red blood that's wet on the wall.... A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge.
Eggleston represented his work in publications such as :

• William Eggleston, 2 1/4 - by William Eggleston, Twin Palms Publishers; Reprint edition (December 1999)
• William Eggleston: Postcard Box (Cards) - by William Eggleston, Fotofolio (August 2004)
• William Eggleston's Guide (Hardcover) - by William Eggleston, John Szarkowski, Museum of Modern Art; Facsimile Ed edition (October 15, 2002)
• Los Alamos - by William Eggleston, Scalo Publishers (June 2003)
• William Eggleston - by William Eggleston, Herve Chandes, Fondation Cartier, Thames & Hudson (May 2002)
• William Eggleston: The Hasselblad Award 1998 - by William Eggleston, Gunilla Knape, Ute Eskildsen, Hasselblad Center, Scalo Publishers (August 1999)
• Aperture Ninety-Six - by William Eggleston, Aperture Book (October 1984)
• Ancient & Modern - by William Eggleston, Random House Value Publishing (June 7, 1995)

From the 1974 publication '14 pictures'

In this series of pictures, i like the use of shadows and light. Also all the images have a slightly red-tinge to them which i think is unique.

From William Eggleston's Guide essay. The museum of modern art, New York, 1976, 2003.

By 1976 colour was everywhere—on every magazine cover, in movie houses, and on televisions. Warhol's commercial-coloured Campbell's soup paintings had appeared in 1965. Dan Flavin was putting coloured neon light sculptures in galleries as far back as 1966. But photography was still almost all black-and-white, guided by aphorisms like Walker Evans' declaration that colour was "vulgar" and Robert Frank's insistence that "black and white are the colours of photography."

Bibliography

• http://www.egglestontrust.com
• http://metroartwork.com/william-eggleston-biography-artwork-m-68.html
• 'Morals of vision' Published in 1978 by Caldecot Chubb, New York