William Eggleston valuation
Photographed the ordinary American South in colour when colour was not thought serious.
William Eggleston was born in Memphis in 1939 and grew up in Sumner, Mississippi, attending Vanderbilt, Delta State and the University of Mississippi without taking a degree.
What a work by William Eggleston is worth
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Bio
William Eggleston was born in Memphis in 1939 and grew up in Sumner, Mississippi, attending Vanderbilt, Delta State and the University of Mississippi without taking a degree. He began in black and white under the influence of Cartier-Bresson and turned to colour in the mid-1960s, photographing the unremarkable — a tricycle, an open freezer, a red ceiling, a Memphis suburb at dusk — as if nothing in the frame mattered more than anything else. William Eggleston's Guide, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 under John Szarkowski, was received with open hostility and is now usually credited with making colour acceptable in the museum. The saturated dye-transfer prints of the 1970s, above all The Red Ceiling, are what most people picture.
Process and date of printing matter more with Eggleston than with most photographers, because one negative can exist as a vintage dye-transfer print, a chromogenic print and a much later pigment print at a different size, and those are different objects. Dye-transfer prints of the 1970s and 1980s are the most closely scrutinised category. Later editions, including large pigment prints of famous early images, were issued as distinct editions, so edition number, size and printing date need establishing together. Signature is usually on the verso or a label. Dye-transfer colour is relatively stable, but the surfaces mark easily. The Eggleston Artistic Trust in Memphis holds the archive and is the reference.
Harvard, dye transfer and 14 Pictures
Eggleston's early models were Robert Frank and Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment, and he began experimenting with colour in 1965 and 1966; John Szarkowski first saw his work in 1969. Teaching at Harvard in 1973 and 1974, he found dye-transfer printing on a Chicago laboratory's price list, and there he prepared his first portfolio, 14 Pictures, of 1974.
He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, the Hasselblad Award in 1998 and an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2003. Some early series were shown only decades later, among them the black and white Nightclub Portraits of 1973, largely unseen until 2005, and in the 1970s he shot hours of video that became Stranded in Canton.
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