The Art of William Eggleston: A Photographer Who Changed Everything

William Eggleston is a photographer who has been a pioneer in the field of color photography, pushing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable and exploring new ways to communicate through images. His work is characterized by its bold and vibrant colors, often used to create a sense of nostalgia and American culture. One of the most interesting aspects of Eggleston's work is his ability to convey emotion and atmosphere through color and composition.

Looking at some of Eggleston's early work, it becomes apparent that he was already experimenting with unconventional techniques and themes. For example, there's this woman sitting on the yellow curb here, just a really bizarre pose, with a shadow on the ground in the way. At first glance, these shots may seem like accidents, but they're actually carefully composed to convey a sense of American culture and everyday life.

Eggleston's work often explores the relationship between art and commerce, as seen in his commission by The Wall Street Journal. In this piece, he's shooting twenty-some-odd Leica cameras with different focal lengths, some loaded with film, creating a quirky and fun shot that showcases his unique approach to photography.

Another interesting aspect of Eggleston's work is its connection to the concept of "complementary colors." This theme is particularly evident in this woman sitting on the yellow curb, where greens being complementary colors create an intriguing effect. Eggleston's exploration of color theory and its impact on photography has been a significant influence on the development of fine art photography.

Eggleston's work also extends to filmmaking, although he prefers photography personally. His short films are often weird and fascinating, reflecting his unique perspective and approach to storytelling. One can draw comparisons between Eggleston's work and that of filmmakers like David Lynch and Sofia Coppola, both known for their bold and unconventional approaches to narrative.

Eggleston's influence can be seen in many areas of the photography world. He has inspired a range of photographers, from those working in fine art to commercial photographers. His use of color and composition has also influenced film directors, such as Martin Scorsese, who have incorporated elements of Eggleston's work into their own films.

Eggleston's commission by Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign committee is another notable example of his ability to take on commissions and turn them into something unusual. In this case, he returned the payment and published a series of photographs that critiqued the commercialization of politics. The result was a bold statement about American culture, featuring abandoned buildings in Georgia, highlighting the contrast between everyday life and the façade of politics.

The influence of Eggleston's work can also be seen in the development of contemporary photography. Photographers like Gregory Crewdson, known for his large-scale color photographs that often explore themes of identity and space, owe a debt to Eggleston's pioneering work. While some photographers may not reference Eggleston directly, it's clear that his unique approach to color and composition has had a lasting impact on the medium.

In conclusion, William Eggleston's contributions to photography are immeasurable. His innovative use of color, bold compositions, and willingness to push boundaries have influenced generations of photographers and filmmakers. While not every shot he takes is beautiful or traditional, they all share a sense of purpose and communication that makes them worthwhile to look at. Without Eggleston, the history of photography would be significantly different, and his influence can still be seen in many areas of contemporary art today.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneverybody my name is Ted Forbes and welcome back to another episode of the art of photography and today we're going to do another colorist and I think we are probably covering the classic ultimate colorist of the history of photography today which is a gentleman by the name of William Eggleston and you know it's interesting because the last three episodes we've been really carrying on with this historical placement of where color falls in fine art photography and when I was trying to come up with the subject to talk about today I think William Eggleston is actually perfect at this point because in many ways he's one of my favorite people to talk about because his work is slightly controversial it's very difficult for some people to deal with and at the same time others are just simply in love with it I happen to really like his work myself and I want to stay fairly neutral in those terms today because I you know he is one of the most significant photographers definitely for color in the history of photography and that's what I want to make the point of because it's a pretty interesting story that I want to share with you about this so with eggless tones work I think there are kind of two things that I want to cover that are going to kind of put this into a little bit of perspective one I think is a Coulson's own background and where he came from and how he ended up becoming a photographer into the placement of where we are in terms of photography's acceptance with color photography's acceptance is fine art by this point Eggleston of the guys that we've been talking about recently Saul Leiter Fred Hertzog eggleston is considerably younger than those guys and he came a little bit later but it's I mentioned before at this point in history I'm talking about the 1950s 1960s we had developed color photography it was commercially available but you didn't see a lot of printing of color photographs and there's a couple reasons for this one the expense of it certainly most magazines were published in black and white with some exceptions you know just where we are in terms of technology at this point in the 50s coming forward to the 1960s and I think this is what makes this pretty interesting because you know in some regards the process of making a color print I think is probably what's holding photography back somewhat there are a couple other reasons but that's one of the big things that's why museums aren't exhibiting color photography at this point they're dealing with traditional process they're dealing with a lot of black and white and that's what's generally regarded as real photography or real fine art photography in those terms and so color is just something you don't see a lot of as I mentioned before guys like Fred Herzog are especially salt lighter they were not really known as colorist or you know even though their work is definitely of that period there's a sense of nostalgia we talked about they weren't really recognized until much later and so leader really you know he had careers of black and white photojournalist fashion photographer his color works were not known until the 1990s when he had this large collection of personal work that gets discovered so this is kind of what we are I'm setting the stage for William Eggleston to come along here now I want to talk a little bit about William Eggleston where he comes from he's still alive today one of my favorite photographers uh he was born in 1939 in Memphis Tennessee and raised in a middle-class family he as a child was interested in music electronics making things and you know a little bit of art but it's not a photographer until he got to college he went to boarding school and there's a reason I'm making this point because I think it relates to what you're going to see a lot of in his work and has said publicly that he had a pretty miserable experience there in terms of fitting in kind of this Spartan attitude of the school and you know this conformist attitude and of course you know you have a guy like Egleston who you can see this in his work is very unique and very different and really doesn't care what anybody else thinks in a lot of ways and there's a real beauty that comes out of them I think this this you know this shapes how he ends up kind of becoming as a photographer if that makes sense and you know he what happens as he goes on to college spent at least five years in various schools never got a degree but it was during this time when he was at Vanderbilt but that a friend of his getting his first camera which was a Leica and if any of my friends ever wanted to give me a like I'd be thrilled but that's beside the point anyway so he goes off to college and after receiving a Leica enjoys taking pictures and studies art a little bit more formally when he goes to Ole Miss and through a series of visiting artists discovers that he loves Abstract Expressionism and other you know work that's being produced by you know avant-garde painters of the time and so anyway so that's where Egleston is coming from on that side things later went to go teach at Harvard we're going to come back to this in a second so as far as the photography landscape at this time you have really as I mentioned before you don't have color being a prominent thing that you're going to find in museums or galleries so if you were a color photographer your resources for getting out and becoming known are very limited in the 60s so about 1969 Eggleston gets a meeting with the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York guy named John Szarkowski who is one of the pivotal figures he was a curator he was the director of photography at MoMA and his predecessor was Edward Steichen so very heavy company obviously and you know I think's our cows key really changed the world of photography I mean you know some of the people he discovered like Winograd or dnr vez or in our case now way mag Liston and so he is to thank for just a lot of what we consider the second half of the 20th century of modern photography really came through mom and they were really plowing ground on that Szarkowski unfortunately died a few years ago but he was a very central pivotal figure in terms of what you know this modern element is coming in so he has this chance meeting which I believe he kind of described as being out of the blue with William Eggleston and he also described him as kind of this weird kid with a suitcase of I think he put dime-store photo prints and this is all he had I mean it was come in with stuff that literally was done in the drugstore on whatever machine they had and this is how he was showing us art and sarcastic he goes back to the board and convinces them to as an acquisition purchase one of Eccleston's pieces and so that was probably late 60s something 68 69 I don't know my dates exact so the following couple of years Eggleston is at Harvard teaching and faculty there and about that time dye transfer process comes out and this is a commercial printing process that is not only inexpensive but Egleston was very impressed with the vibrancy and the colors there in a lot of these inks that are being used and being someone who's very interested in color photography he had really no means to actually blow these up and reproduce them in the kind of quality and the kind of you know brilliance that you know would convince our museum otherwise now what happens is this is about 1976 I believe is that moment actually does a full show of William Eggleston images and this is really considered to be the groundbreaking watershed moment for photography because it's the moment where a major show that becomes extremely successful and extremely different and extremely weird and avant-garde and embraces a lot of the late 60s and early 70s buddy its photography and its color this is the first time that it ever happened now MoMA had previously shown some color works by certain people like Ernst Haas but this was the first big one and so I think that sets the stage for us is those two things you have a goal students coming along and is very much a nonconformist very much going to do things his way and has a real eye to him and then you have this climate that's just absolutely perfect right at this point where you all of a sudden have this process where he's going to make prints and you have a curator at a major art gallery or major museum who's willing to showcase it so that's where we come from so what I want to do now is we're going to go over and look at some of Exxon's work and I'm going to talk you through this because it's very different it seems to be he's one of those guys you either love or you hate and I love him and I'm going to try to show you why and again I'm trying to remain neutral somewhat because of you know I just think his importance as a figure in modern photography so come on over and let's check out the work of William Eggleston okay so we are going to use Pinterest once again for a presentation here today and if you guys want to follow along just in case you didn't know you can go to Pinterest and if you want to look at some of these images on your own and click on links and stuff my account is pinterest.com slash Ted Forbes all one-word to Edie fo our BES and if you scroll all the way down to the bottom when you see my board's page which is at that URL there's two in particular and I want to take a quick glance at someone else before we get into Egleston it's a gentle named William Christenberry and it would be kind of fun to do a whole show on christenbury but William christenbury is a photographer who kind of in a lot of ways was largely responsible sorry Pinterest just being buggy here let's reload for encouraging Eggleston to pursue a career in as a photographer and christenbury is kind of known for these very dark front sighted American 1950s rural structures and so here's one of this size emits a church or a schoolhouse and there's some others in here as well and what's interesting is these images he actually shot that just very simply in color on a Kodak Brownie they were you know very cheap camera and if you blow these up you can actually see that it blurs just like you would expect a brownie to and I think this is kind of the mark that paved the way for some what William Eggleston was going to be doing and Christenberry actually took these images he was a painter as well and they were simply studies for his own personal use that he was going to use for a series of paintings he was working on and they've kind of become known as this you know kind of an obscure kind of way for those who dig deep enough this this wonderful little collection of early color photos and that's what William Christenberry is kind of known for and these are all really cool they're just a little slice of life Americana just very stoic front-facing structures the usually freestanding sometimes there's you know like a trailer back here this five cent sign anyway kind of cool stuff and Christenberry was one of the people who knew a Austin and talked him into you know encouraged him to become a photographer and I think that is the significant part of that so what we're going to do is now we're going to flip over and navigate the petrous let's go all the way down and let's go ahead and check out William Eggleston and view some of his work and I want to start with two early black-and-white images that I just adore is one of a secretary in an office building and there's another one in this car and I think what you start to see here this is very post robert frank and i think this is where you're going to start seeing eggleston come into his own these are early they are black-and-white and what's interesting about them is you know if you're looking for beauty if you're looking for classic rule of thirds classical composition techniques if you're looking for you know just this pristine you know presentation you're not going to find it here these are a little odd they're in some ways you might define them as even being poorly taken out of focus in areas blurry in areas and the camera is not really even lined up or being held straight but this creates an interesting aesthetic and a juxtaposition that you're going to see carried through in a lot of this work and I think when Christenberry is working we're looking at had a little similar effect although those were taken to be studies for paintings we're assuming he would clean up details later what you have here is is something that where you have all the symmetry but it's thrown off by the camera being thrown offense it's completely intentional and I think it's one of the charming things about it is almost this snapshot kind of feel to a lot of this stuff that you're going to see and this carries over into some of the color work as well like for instance this image that looks like it's taken either on a motorcycle or in the rear view mirror of a car something because you have this blurred image with a reflection at the bottom but I love the way this is just this city street you right in the middle there's a guy about to write off on a motorcycle a dog is lying in the road but there is this real sense of open space in this composition within the perspective and things seem like they may be just thrown in or in random places but I really think that this becomes decisive moment stuff now some of you may disagree with me I understand and you're going to have to get over the fact that I love Eccleston so you know personally I don't shoot like this but I love it and I'm a huge fan of it sometimes even with people there's a very almost a somber sense of isolation where you're not really connecting with some of these people in a very warm way there's not a sense of whimsical nature or personality necessarily it's pretty much expressionless faces looking right at you but at the same time I think that there really is something that draws you in on here and what Egleston is doing with this and I don't know if there's picking up on the video or not but he's using color and if you look at the vibrancy in the blue in this kids shirt that's what you're going to start to see in Ag Liston's work now we're kind of talking about the starkness and oddness and I think probably uncomfortable nature of some of these compositions like this woman you know with this jarring flash an extra brick wall at night but I want you to start seeing the color the shades how color works together in the first image that kind of made a huge splash with Egleston was this one no just called red ceiling and by today's standard you know we're bombarded with color we're bombarded with imagery and it's harder to look at this image in context I think in the day that we're living in now at the time though this was groundbreaking the fact that it was and I hate the fact we're doing this in a video too because I think you need to see an original print of this because there's a vibrancy to the red and eggleston has gone on record as saying he's never sure that he got it right how he wanted it to look but this vibrancy of red if you kind of I think a modern example you might be able to compare this to if you're familiar with the Amish Kapoor sculptures in Chicago of the Giants chrome beam well the beam isn't revolutionary and it's rather large and we've seen that before but the fact that it's this galumphing you know anther more fake or biomorphic chrome blob that's coming at you the chrome is what has a big impact on the way we perceive that piece I think this is almost the Chicago beam of photography in the sense but it's not chrome in this sense it is this red which is the color that drives most sensitive to now this is a very crude image there's something very uncomfortable about all the wires that are plugged into the light fixture that's in the middle of this red ceiling why it's blood red I don't know there's a certain sense of creepy or low-budget horror film that starts coming out of this which you see where I'm going with this this is intentional and this is what he was trying to set up and even more strange is the small diagram that's barely in the bottom of the image of stick figures in various suggestive sexual positions and it's a different photo if that's not there so you know these little things that seem like they're there you know accidents in the composition or they you know we didn't move the camera frame it up correctly well they're there for a reason and like I've said before with composition when you put things close to the edge they end up having a lot of weight to them and this is a weird juxtaposed photo where you have something it has a lot of weight next to the edge being that poster back there and then you have something in the middle and they're definitely creating a weird creepy vibe so you know you have that sense in his work this is a lesser-known piece but what another one of my favorites is this green window and really exploring what colors going to do in photography at this point because again black and white is what we're what we're dealt with at this point another thing that's kind of interesting too and you see this theme come up a lot in a g'sten swert are situations of things that normally are associated with people and there's no people in these images like all these dolls on the front of this Cadillac which is beautifully bizarre with this wonderful sky in the back but there's no humans in the image so it's creating these situations kind of like where did people go and what how did this get here kind of thing another one of this grill with a with a red axe and a extension cord on the ground and the way that this reddish orange permeates this image amongst the green and you know what it looks to be kind of an overcast day it was shot on imperfect photo but there's some amazing experimental things going on here definitely if you cue and kind of abstract expression and then also there's the famous image of the tricycle with no humans in the in the in the image either now the other interesting thing about the tricycle and I have talked about this on the show before and this is probably my favorite Egleston image one is where this is shot from it's shot from the ground up and because of the perspective and the proximity of the tricycle to the houses in the back the tricycle looks huge this tricycle is actually probably very small obviously but there's just kind of a little bit of an optical thing that's going on and it just happens to be a color photo that I think just for whatever reason this is one of those images that really speaks to me another famous image that you may agree less with is the freezer with frozen food and a lot of frost intact it's another one that I believe mom owns one of the more beautiful images I think of these these two women smoking at a diner I've showed this on the show as well I think this is more in line with what you see guys like Saul liter if red hairs are doing but just you know beautiful color the way the color works together you know these reds and greens being complementary colors quite interesting another famous one is this woman sitting on the yellow curb here just a really bizarre pose there's a shadow on the ground that's in the way and like I said at first glance sometimes these look like almost accidental just not throughout thought through shots at all and that is not the case I'm going to end this with a shot that eggleston did and this is one that he did I believe it was for The Wall Street Journal when they were doing a story and there's just something very comical about this is this is a ghost ins foot and his camera bag and it's a quirky little shot and what he's doing with twenty-some-odd Leica's that are all kind of the same thing I have no idea but probably focal length differences some are loaded with film you just go out and go I don't know but anyway it's kind of a fun shot to end this on so anyway that is William a ghost and I hope that you know if this work speaks to you you probably found it enjoyable if Egleston doesn't speak to you I hope that you give it a second shot and try to look at it in the context of which it is from and I think you will start to notice you know particularly with these wild colors and these brilliant you know this is what he's doing he's communicating in color and it's the first time this has ever been done in the fine art world and it literally changed everything for the future photography so I hope that what you're saying here with the work of William Eggleston is whether or not it's something you enjoy or not I think you have to look at its importance in the history of photography and I can't harp on this enough I'm one of the people I'm on the side I love William Eggleston to work sometimes it's weird sometimes it's not something that's a beautiful image but it makes you think and it's showing you something and he certainly is unique and certainly has its own thing going on and you know it's odd well I'll make a comparison to it and it's interesting too because William Eggleston did make some short films and they are weird if you've ever seen them I prefers photography personally but you know if you look at some of the things that he inspired and I think this is really obvious with film directors if you're looking for you know something that's more traditional something it's very beautiful something it's very Spielberg Ian or if that's a word or phrase Disney you're not going to find it I mean what you're going to find it's David Lynch or you're going to find you know the people that really push that envelope of the bizarre I think Sofia Copeland at times you know and like her father she pushes in that direction and I think you certainly see the influence on her work you know in terms of Egleston you know his color aesthetic and I said because she has mentioned of him being an influence but you know it's this David Byrne David Lynch kind of school of what they're going for you know and very much an outsider and I think that if you consider those things and actually say one more point in there as well you know there were several commissions that Eggleston had some interesting fun with one of them was when Jimmy Carter was running for president he was hired by the campaign committee to do some shots of Carter and basically what he did is he goes out to Georgia in the town that Jimmy Carter was from and shoots a bunch of old abandoned buildings returns the payment and publishes a myself and makes this bizarre political statement there's no people in any of these photos it's just kind of a statement of you know here's America despite the fact I'm supposed to be shooting an election so it's very interesting he was also commissioned to go shoot Graceland after Elvis had died and there's a series of shots of Graceland and the strange opulence of a I mean it's right up Egleston Sally and the weird color nature of all of it and you know I think without Egleston you don't have people you know like Greg recruits in' or some of these great colors that are working now that have this sense of space this sense of you know an impersonal nature with people sometimes but still telling a story and I've never heard cruising directly refer to Eggleston sand influence I'm I'm assuming that but I really think that without that piece the history of photography is completely different so anyway I know there's been kind of a long-winded episode and a lot to get through today but I hope you guys have found it somewhat interesting and we're going to pick up here next week and anyway that's it for today so once again guys thank you for watching the art of photography I'll see you next time latereverybody my name is Ted Forbes and welcome back to another episode of the art of photography and today we're going to do another colorist and I think we are probably covering the classic ultimate colorist of the history of photography today which is a gentleman by the name of William Eggleston and you know it's interesting because the last three episodes we've been really carrying on with this historical placement of where color falls in fine art photography and when I was trying to come up with the subject to talk about today I think William Eggleston is actually perfect at this point because in many ways he's one of my favorite people to talk about because his work is slightly controversial it's very difficult for some people to deal with and at the same time others are just simply in love with it I happen to really like his work myself and I want to stay fairly neutral in those terms today because I you know he is one of the most significant photographers definitely for color in the history of photography and that's what I want to make the point of because it's a pretty interesting story that I want to share with you about this so with eggless tones work I think there are kind of two things that I want to cover that are going to kind of put this into a little bit of perspective one I think is a Coulson's own background and where he came from and how he ended up becoming a photographer into the placement of where we are in terms of photography's acceptance with color photography's acceptance is fine art by this point Eggleston of the guys that we've been talking about recently Saul Leiter Fred Hertzog eggleston is considerably younger than those guys and he came a little bit later but it's I mentioned before at this point in history I'm talking about the 1950s 1960s we had developed color photography it was commercially available but you didn't see a lot of printing of color photographs and there's a couple reasons for this one the expense of it certainly most magazines were published in black and white with some exceptions you know just where we are in terms of technology at this point in the 50s coming forward to the 1960s and I think this is what makes this pretty interesting because you know in some regards the process of making a color print I think is probably what's holding photography back somewhat there are a couple other reasons but that's one of the big things that's why museums aren't exhibiting color photography at this point they're dealing with traditional process they're dealing with a lot of black and white and that's what's generally regarded as real photography or real fine art photography in those terms and so color is just something you don't see a lot of as I mentioned before guys like Fred Herzog are especially salt lighter they were not really known as colorist or you know even though their work is definitely of that period there's a sense of nostalgia we talked about they weren't really recognized until much later and so leader really you know he had careers of black and white photojournalist fashion photographer his color works were not known until the 1990s when he had this large collection of personal work that gets discovered so this is kind of what we are I'm setting the stage for William Eggleston to come along here now I want to talk a little bit about William Eggleston where he comes from he's still alive today one of my favorite photographers uh he was born in 1939 in Memphis Tennessee and raised in a middle-class family he as a child was interested in music electronics making things and you know a little bit of art but it's not a photographer until he got to college he went to boarding school and there's a reason I'm making this point because I think it relates to what you're going to see a lot of in his work and has said publicly that he had a pretty miserable experience there in terms of fitting in kind of this Spartan attitude of the school and you know this conformist attitude and of course you know you have a guy like Egleston who you can see this in his work is very unique and very different and really doesn't care what anybody else thinks in a lot of ways and there's a real beauty that comes out of them I think this this you know this shapes how he ends up kind of becoming as a photographer if that makes sense and you know he what happens as he goes on to college spent at least five years in various schools never got a degree but it was during this time when he was at Vanderbilt but that a friend of his getting his first camera which was a Leica and if any of my friends ever wanted to give me a like I'd be thrilled but that's beside the point anyway so he goes off to college and after receiving a Leica enjoys taking pictures and studies art a little bit more formally when he goes to Ole Miss and through a series of visiting artists discovers that he loves Abstract Expressionism and other you know work that's being produced by you know avant-garde painters of the time and so anyway so that's where Egleston is coming from on that side things later went to go teach at Harvard we're going to come back to this in a second so as far as the photography landscape at this time you have really as I mentioned before you don't have color being a prominent thing that you're going to find in museums or galleries so if you were a color photographer your resources for getting out and becoming known are very limited in the 60s so about 1969 Eggleston gets a meeting with the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York guy named John Szarkowski who is one of the pivotal figures he was a curator he was the director of photography at MoMA and his predecessor was Edward Steichen so very heavy company obviously and you know I think's our cows key really changed the world of photography I mean you know some of the people he discovered like Winograd or dnr vez or in our case now way mag Liston and so he is to thank for just a lot of what we consider the second half of the 20th century of modern photography really came through mom and they were really plowing ground on that Szarkowski unfortunately died a few years ago but he was a very central pivotal figure in terms of what you know this modern element is coming in so he has this chance meeting which I believe he kind of described as being out of the blue with William Eggleston and he also described him as kind of this weird kid with a suitcase of I think he put dime-store photo prints and this is all he had I mean it was come in with stuff that literally was done in the drugstore on whatever machine they had and this is how he was showing us art and sarcastic he goes back to the board and convinces them to as an acquisition purchase one of Eccleston's pieces and so that was probably late 60s something 68 69 I don't know my dates exact so the following couple of years Eggleston is at Harvard teaching and faculty there and about that time dye transfer process comes out and this is a commercial printing process that is not only inexpensive but Egleston was very impressed with the vibrancy and the colors there in a lot of these inks that are being used and being someone who's very interested in color photography he had really no means to actually blow these up and reproduce them in the kind of quality and the kind of you know brilliance that you know would convince our museum otherwise now what happens is this is about 1976 I believe is that moment actually does a full show of William Eggleston images and this is really considered to be the groundbreaking watershed moment for photography because it's the moment where a major show that becomes extremely successful and extremely different and extremely weird and avant-garde and embraces a lot of the late 60s and early 70s buddy its photography and its color this is the first time that it ever happened now MoMA had previously shown some color works by certain people like Ernst Haas but this was the first big one and so I think that sets the stage for us is those two things you have a goal students coming along and is very much a nonconformist very much going to do things his way and has a real eye to him and then you have this climate that's just absolutely perfect right at this point where you all of a sudden have this process where he's going to make prints and you have a curator at a major art gallery or major museum who's willing to showcase it so that's where we come from so what I want to do now is we're going to go over and look at some of Exxon's work and I'm going to talk you through this because it's very different it seems to be he's one of those guys you either love or you hate and I love him and I'm going to try to show you why and again I'm trying to remain neutral somewhat because of you know I just think his importance as a figure in modern photography so come on over and let's check out the work of William Eggleston okay so we are going to use Pinterest once again for a presentation here today and if you guys want to follow along just in case you didn't know you can go to Pinterest and if you want to look at some of these images on your own and click on links and stuff my account is pinterest.com slash Ted Forbes all one-word to Edie fo our BES and if you scroll all the way down to the bottom when you see my board's page which is at that URL there's two in particular and I want to take a quick glance at someone else before we get into Egleston it's a gentle named William Christenberry and it would be kind of fun to do a whole show on christenbury but William christenbury is a photographer who kind of in a lot of ways was largely responsible sorry Pinterest just being buggy here let's reload for encouraging Eggleston to pursue a career in as a photographer and christenbury is kind of known for these very dark front sighted American 1950s rural structures and so here's one of this size emits a church or a schoolhouse and there's some others in here as well and what's interesting is these images he actually shot that just very simply in color on a Kodak Brownie they were you know very cheap camera and if you blow these up you can actually see that it blurs just like you would expect a brownie to and I think this is kind of the mark that paved the way for some what William Eggleston was going to be doing and Christenberry actually took these images he was a painter as well and they were simply studies for his own personal use that he was going to use for a series of paintings he was working on and they've kind of become known as this you know kind of an obscure kind of way for those who dig deep enough this this wonderful little collection of early color photos and that's what William Christenberry is kind of known for and these are all really cool they're just a little slice of life Americana just very stoic front-facing structures the usually freestanding sometimes there's you know like a trailer back here this five cent sign anyway kind of cool stuff and Christenberry was one of the people who knew a Austin and talked him into you know encouraged him to become a photographer and I think that is the significant part of that so what we're going to do is now we're going to flip over and navigate the petrous let's go all the way down and let's go ahead and check out William Eggleston and view some of his work and I want to start with two early black-and-white images that I just adore is one of a secretary in an office building and there's another one in this car and I think what you start to see here this is very post robert frank and i think this is where you're going to start seeing eggleston come into his own these are early they are black-and-white and what's interesting about them is you know if you're looking for beauty if you're looking for classic rule of thirds classical composition techniques if you're looking for you know just this pristine you know presentation you're not going to find it here these are a little odd they're in some ways you might define them as even being poorly taken out of focus in areas blurry in areas and the camera is not really even lined up or being held straight but this creates an interesting aesthetic and a juxtaposition that you're going to see carried through in a lot of this work and I think when Christenberry is working we're looking at had a little similar effect although those were taken to be studies for paintings we're assuming he would clean up details later what you have here is is something that where you have all the symmetry but it's thrown off by the camera being thrown offense it's completely intentional and I think it's one of the charming things about it is almost this snapshot kind of feel to a lot of this stuff that you're going to see and this carries over into some of the color work as well like for instance this image that looks like it's taken either on a motorcycle or in the rear view mirror of a car something because you have this blurred image with a reflection at the bottom but I love the way this is just this city street you right in the middle there's a guy about to write off on a motorcycle a dog is lying in the road but there is this real sense of open space in this composition within the perspective and things seem like they may be just thrown in or in random places but I really think that this becomes decisive moment stuff now some of you may disagree with me I understand and you're going to have to get over the fact that I love Eccleston so you know personally I don't shoot like this but I love it and I'm a huge fan of it sometimes even with people there's a very almost a somber sense of isolation where you're not really connecting with some of these people in a very warm way there's not a sense of whimsical nature or personality necessarily it's pretty much expressionless faces looking right at you but at the same time I think that there really is something that draws you in on here and what Egleston is doing with this and I don't know if there's picking up on the video or not but he's using color and if you look at the vibrancy in the blue in this kids shirt that's what you're going to start to see in Ag Liston's work now we're kind of talking about the starkness and oddness and I think probably uncomfortable nature of some of these compositions like this woman you know with this jarring flash an extra brick wall at night but I want you to start seeing the color the shades how color works together in the first image that kind of made a huge splash with Egleston was this one no just called red ceiling and by today's standard you know we're bombarded with color we're bombarded with imagery and it's harder to look at this image in context I think in the day that we're living in now at the time though this was groundbreaking the fact that it was and I hate the fact we're doing this in a video too because I think you need to see an original print of this because there's a vibrancy to the red and eggleston has gone on record as saying he's never sure that he got it right how he wanted it to look but this vibrancy of red if you kind of I think a modern example you might be able to compare this to if you're familiar with the Amish Kapoor sculptures in Chicago of the Giants chrome beam well the beam isn't revolutionary and it's rather large and we've seen that before but the fact that it's this galumphing you know anther more fake or biomorphic chrome blob that's coming at you the chrome is what has a big impact on the way we perceive that piece I think this is almost the Chicago beam of photography in the sense but it's not chrome in this sense it is this red which is the color that drives most sensitive to now this is a very crude image there's something very uncomfortable about all the wires that are plugged into the light fixture that's in the middle of this red ceiling why it's blood red I don't know there's a certain sense of creepy or low-budget horror film that starts coming out of this which you see where I'm going with this this is intentional and this is what he was trying to set up and even more strange is the small diagram that's barely in the bottom of the image of stick figures in various suggestive sexual positions and it's a different photo if that's not there so you know these little things that seem like they're there you know accidents in the composition or they you know we didn't move the camera frame it up correctly well they're there for a reason and like I've said before with composition when you put things close to the edge they end up having a lot of weight to them and this is a weird juxtaposed photo where you have something it has a lot of weight next to the edge being that poster back there and then you have something in the middle and they're definitely creating a weird creepy vibe so you know you have that sense in his work this is a lesser-known piece but what another one of my favorites is this green window and really exploring what colors going to do in photography at this point because again black and white is what we're what we're dealt with at this point another thing that's kind of interesting too and you see this theme come up a lot in a g'sten swert are situations of things that normally are associated with people and there's no people in these images like all these dolls on the front of this Cadillac which is beautifully bizarre with this wonderful sky in the back but there's no humans in the image so it's creating these situations kind of like where did people go and what how did this get here kind of thing another one of this grill with a with a red axe and a extension cord on the ground and the way that this reddish orange permeates this image amongst the green and you know what it looks to be kind of an overcast day it was shot on imperfect photo but there's some amazing experimental things going on here definitely if you cue and kind of abstract expression and then also there's the famous image of the tricycle with no humans in the in the in the image either now the other interesting thing about the tricycle and I have talked about this on the show before and this is probably my favorite Egleston image one is where this is shot from it's shot from the ground up and because of the perspective and the proximity of the tricycle to the houses in the back the tricycle looks huge this tricycle is actually probably very small obviously but there's just kind of a little bit of an optical thing that's going on and it just happens to be a color photo that I think just for whatever reason this is one of those images that really speaks to me another famous image that you may agree less with is the freezer with frozen food and a lot of frost intact it's another one that I believe mom owns one of the more beautiful images I think of these these two women smoking at a diner I've showed this on the show as well I think this is more in line with what you see guys like Saul liter if red hairs are doing but just you know beautiful color the way the color works together you know these reds and greens being complementary colors quite interesting another famous one is this woman sitting on the yellow curb here just a really bizarre pose there's a shadow on the ground that's in the way and like I said at first glance sometimes these look like almost accidental just not throughout thought through shots at all and that is not the case I'm going to end this with a shot that eggleston did and this is one that he did I believe it was for The Wall Street Journal when they were doing a story and there's just something very comical about this is this is a ghost ins foot and his camera bag and it's a quirky little shot and what he's doing with twenty-some-odd Leica's that are all kind of the same thing I have no idea but probably focal length differences some are loaded with film you just go out and go I don't know but anyway it's kind of a fun shot to end this on so anyway that is William a ghost and I hope that you know if this work speaks to you you probably found it enjoyable if Egleston doesn't speak to you I hope that you give it a second shot and try to look at it in the context of which it is from and I think you will start to notice you know particularly with these wild colors and these brilliant you know this is what he's doing he's communicating in color and it's the first time this has ever been done in the fine art world and it literally changed everything for the future photography so I hope that what you're saying here with the work of William Eggleston is whether or not it's something you enjoy or not I think you have to look at its importance in the history of photography and I can't harp on this enough I'm one of the people I'm on the side I love William Eggleston to work sometimes it's weird sometimes it's not something that's a beautiful image but it makes you think and it's showing you something and he certainly is unique and certainly has its own thing going on and you know it's odd well I'll make a comparison to it and it's interesting too because William Eggleston did make some short films and they are weird if you've ever seen them I prefers photography personally but you know if you look at some of the things that he inspired and I think this is really obvious with film directors if you're looking for you know something that's more traditional something it's very beautiful something it's very Spielberg Ian or if that's a word or phrase Disney you're not going to find it I mean what you're going to find it's David Lynch or you're going to find you know the people that really push that envelope of the bizarre I think Sofia Copeland at times you know and like her father she pushes in that direction and I think you certainly see the influence on her work you know in terms of Egleston you know his color aesthetic and I said because she has mentioned of him being an influence but you know it's this David Byrne David Lynch kind of school of what they're going for you know and very much an outsider and I think that if you consider those things and actually say one more point in there as well you know there were several commissions that Eggleston had some interesting fun with one of them was when Jimmy Carter was running for president he was hired by the campaign committee to do some shots of Carter and basically what he did is he goes out to Georgia in the town that Jimmy Carter was from and shoots a bunch of old abandoned buildings returns the payment and publishes a myself and makes this bizarre political statement there's no people in any of these photos it's just kind of a statement of you know here's America despite the fact I'm supposed to be shooting an election so it's very interesting he was also commissioned to go shoot Graceland after Elvis had died and there's a series of shots of Graceland and the strange opulence of a I mean it's right up Egleston Sally and the weird color nature of all of it and you know I think without Egleston you don't have people you know like Greg recruits in' or some of these great colors that are working now that have this sense of space this sense of you know an impersonal nature with people sometimes but still telling a story and I've never heard cruising directly refer to Eggleston sand influence I'm I'm assuming that but I really think that without that piece the history of photography is completely different so anyway I know there's been kind of a long-winded episode and a lot to get through today but I hope you guys have found it somewhat interesting and we're going to pick up here next week and anyway that's it for today so once again guys thank you for watching the art of photography I'll see you next time later\n"