William Eggleston

Related to portrait idea.

William Eggleston is not most famous for his portraits, but they feature every now and then in between his photographs of urban America. Eggleston photographs the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. He was the first photographer to make colour photographs accepted as art to hang in a gallery. The colour in his work may not look amazing today, but when he was ‘discovered’ in the seventies, it was considered groundbreaking. I see why. There is a quality to the colour in some of these photographs that is really beautiful.

What I find particularly interesting, in relation to portraits, is the casualness of them. Eggleston didn’t take more than one photo of every subject, so what he’d get would be very random. I like that in some of the images you can’t see the face of the subject and in some of the images something other than the people seems to be the main focus of the image. The people are almost like an afterthought.

My favourite image of the ones I have picked out here, is the one below. I love the colour and the light. It looks like the photograph wss taken in the afternoon, as the sun is starting to go down. It gives a wonderful quality to the light. The colours are have a yellow tint and are not very contrasty. The sky is very pale, but you see a vague tint of blue. I really love the fact that the people are not the main focus of the image. They are hidden behind a car. At the same time, though, they are what your eyes are drawn to when you look at this image. They are the subject of the image even though they may not seem to be at first glance.

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