Marking the 50th anniversary of William Eggleston's landmark exhibition and book William Eggleston's Guide (1976), this exhibition offers a fresh perspective on one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century.
A pioneer of colour photography, Eggleston (b.1939, Memphis, USA) is renowned for combining everyday observation with an intuitive sense of colour and composition. William Eggleston: All That Goes Unnoticed brings together many of his iconic works, alongside lesser-known images. Declaring himself as ‘at war with the obvious’, Eggleston’s democratic way of seeing redefined colour photography and transformed how the ordinary could be represented.
Alongside his celebrated colour photographs and rarely seen vintage dye-transfer prints, the exhibition includes his lesser-known black-and-white and Brownie images from the early 1960s and 1970s. These early black and white images show the emergence of his legendary way of seeing and attentiveness to ordinary life, before colour became central to his photography.
The roadside diners, suburban streets and domestic spaces of Eggleston’s photographs reveal a sense of isolation characteristic of his subjects. These classic photographs expose the underlying cracks of the American Dream – alienation, loneliness, desire – simultaneously seductive and lurid, tense and revealing. His photographs offer a slower, more attentive way of looking – a way of making the ordinary extraordinary.
Get to know William Eggleston
William Eggleston (b. 1939) is widely regarded as one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century and a pioneering figure in the acceptance of colour photography as art. Born in Memphis and raised in the American South, Eggleston began photographing in the late 1950s. His breakthrough came in 1976 with the publication of William Eggleston's Guide and the accompanying exhibition at MoMA, curated by John Szarkowski. The exhibition was controversial at the time, but it is now recognised as a landmark moment in photographic history. Through his use of the dye-transfer process and his attention to ordinary subjects – suburban streets, roadside signs, domestic interiors and everyday objects – Eggleston challenged conventional ideas about what was worthy of photographic attention.
Throughout his career, Eggleston developed what he described as a “democratic” approach to image-making, in which all subjects possess equal visual importance. Major bodies of work, including William Eggleston's Guide and Los Alamos, have had a profound influence on subsequent generations of photographers, filmmakers and artists. Today, Eggleston's work is held in leading museum collections worldwide and continues to shape contemporary visual culture.
William Eggleston: All That Goes Unnoticed is organised by The Photographers’ Gallery, in partnership with the Wilson Centre for Photography
