1960s - discovering color photography Eggleston's early photographic efforts were inspired by the work of Swiss-born photographer
Robert Frank, and by French photographer
Henri Cartier-Bresson's book,
The Decisive Moment. The dye-transfer process resulted in some of Eggleston's most striking and famous work, such as his 1973 photograph
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." the tale that the Eggleston exhibition was MoMA's first exhibition of color photography is frequently repeated,and the 1976 show is regarded as a watershed moment in the history of photography, by marking "the acceptance of colour photography by the highest validating institution". Some of his early series were not shown until the late 2000s. For example, The
Nightclub Portraits (1973), a series of large black-and-white portraits in bars and clubs around Memphis was, for the most part, not shown until 2005.
Lost and Found, part of Eggleston's
Los Alamos series, is a body of photographs that have remained unseen for decades because until 2008 no one knew that they belonged to
Walter Hopps. The works from this series chronicle road trips the artist took with Hopps, leaving from Memphis and traveling as far as the West Coast. Eggleston's
Election Eve photographs were not editioned until 2011.
Experimentation with video In the 1970s, Eggleston also experimented with video, producing several hours of roughly edited footage Eggleston called
Stranded in Canton. Writer Richard Woodward called this footage a "demented home movie", mixing tender shots of his children at home with shots of drunken parties, public urination, and a man biting off a chicken's head before a cheering crowd in New Orleans. Woodward suggested that the film is reflective of Eggleston's "fearless naturalism—a belief that by looking patiently at what others ignore or look away from, interesting things can be seen."
1980s Eggleston also worked with filmmakers, photographing the set of
John Huston's film
Annie (1982) and documenting the making of
David Byrne's film
True Stories (1986).
1990s - present Eggleston's mature work is characterized by its ordinary subject matter. As
Eudora Welty noted in her introduction to
The Democratic Forest, an Eggleston photograph might include "old tires, Dr. Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, parking meters, and palm trees crowding the same curb." Eudora Welty suggests that Eggleston sees the complexity and beauty of the mundane world: "The extraordinary, compelling, honest, beautiful and unsparing photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the everyday world: they succeed in showing us the grain of the present, like the cross-section of a tree... They focus on the mundane world. But
no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!" Mark Holborn, in his introduction to
Ancient and Modern, writes about the dark undercurrent of these mundane scenes as viewed through Eggleston's lens: "[Eggleston's] subjects are, on the surface, the ordinary inhabitants and environs of suburban Memphis and Mississippi—friends, family, barbecues, back yards, a tricycle and the clutter of the mundane. The normality of these subjects is deceptive, for behind the images there is a sense of lurking danger." American artist
Edward Ruscha said of Eggleston's work, "When you see a picture he's taken, you're stepping into some kind of jagged world that seems like Eggleston World." ==Music==